Co-Directors

Jen Buckley

Associate Professor, English (CLAS)

Buckley teaches, researches, and writes about modern and contemporary drama, theater, performance art, and media in Europe, the UK, and the US. Her first book manuscript, Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print after 1900, details the complex relationship between text and performance in the twentieth-century European and American avant-gardes. Her second book manuscript, Act without Words: Speechless Performance on the Modern Stage, examines why and how the concept of a “language” of gesture attracted nineteenth- and twentieth-century theater artists, writers, and theorists disenchanted with the capacity of spoken and written language to represent human experience. Buckley has published essays on topics ranging from Bernard Shaw’s 1890s plays to Forced Entertainment’s digital performances.


Joyce Tsai

Chief Curator, Stanley Museum of Art
Associate Professor, School of Art and Art History (CLAS)

Tsai is Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Art and Art History and Chief Curator at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, and Director of the Intermedia Research Initiative. Her curatorial, pedagogical, and scholarly work engage questions of technology, politics, philosophy in modern and contemporary art. Her book, László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography, is winner of the Phillips Collection Book Prize.