Shelby Lunderman

Shelby Lunderman is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington. She received her MA in Theatre Studies from Florida State University and her BFA in Theatre Performance from Baylor University with a minor in Political Science focused on U.S. Constitutional Law.

Not only has she taught drama-as-process courses in correctional facilities in both Texas and Florida, Shelby actively researches the relationship between prison and theatre through ethnography and archival research. She is currently interested in the ways in which performance, broadly-conceived, is used for activist purposes fighting against the Age of Mass Incarceration in the United States.

Her dissertation, "Cruel and Unusual Performance: (Re)producing Capital Punishment on the U.S. Stage" examines theatrical representations of state-sanctioned executions in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present through an in-depth engagement with stage performance, contemporaneously circulating scholarly and legal discourses regarding the death penalty, and Foucauldian concepts of punishment, security, governmentality, and biopolitics. Through this research, the project interrogates how such stagings of the death penalty (re)produce—consciously or sub-consciously—the conditions under which capital punishment in the U.S. thrives.