Shilarna Stokes

Lecturer in Theater Studies

Shilarna Stokes holds a B.A. from Yale as well an M.F.A. in Directing and a Ph.D. in Theatre from Columbia University. She joins Yale after serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at The Ohio State University. As a director, she has worked on more than fifty plays with companies throughout the New York and Boston areas. Most recently, she was co-investigator and artistic director for Be the Street, a two-year pilot project in community-engaged performance in Columbus, Ohio. As a researcher, she studies the history, theory, and practice of mass spectacle, with a focus on large-scale political pageants. This fall, she is teaching THST 210: “Performance Concepts” and THST 312: “Censorship, Theatre, and Performance.”