TEYA LYNAE JUAREZ

Teya Juarez (she/her) is a scholar, dramaturg, educator, and current Theatre and Performance PhD student at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). She received her BA in Theatre Arts-Acting, with a minor in Philosophy, from California State University, Fresno, and her Master’s in Theatre Arts from Villanova University. Her Master’s thesis, titled “Too Much and Not Enough: Theatrical Normativity and Fat Embodiment,” focused on the way that fat bodies are treated and represented in theatre, developing a theory of fat phenomenology (directly inspired by Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology) to theorize fat embodiment. Her current research continues her investigation of the intersections of fat studies and theatre and performance studies, often incorporating queer theory and intersectional feminism to discuss bodies in performance. As a small fat person, she is dedicated to critiquing and dismantling anti-fatness in theatre for all fat bodies, as well as highlighting the liberatory potentials for fat bodies in performance.

 

Her chapter “‘I want to bless somebody with how soft I can be’: Disidentifications with Softness in James Ijames’ Fat Ham” will be published in 2025 in Revenge is Mad Hard: Fat Ham and the Question of Cultural Reclamation (edited by Valerie Clayman Pye and Danielle Rosvally, Palgrave Macmillan). Her essay, “‘How Dare You Presume I’d Rather Be Thin’: Origins/Iterations of Fat Activism and Performances of Fatness,” for which she received the 2024 American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS) Emerging Scholar Award, will be featured in the 2025 volume of Theatre Annual. Her article “‘Is This Thing On?’: Staging Gender, Sexuality, and Race via Metatheatricality” can be found online in the Villanova CONCEPT Graduate Studies Journal.

 

At UB, Teya has been the instructor of record and teaching assistant for undergraduate courses including Performing America and Global Dance Studies. As an educator, she utilizes ungrading techniques, emphasizing generative engagement with course materials and productive conversation with her students. 

 

She is currently the Graduate Student Representative for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) LGBTQ+ Focus Group, for which she is organizing the Doric Wilson Panel for the 2025 Pre-Conference programming. Teya is also an early-career dramaturg; she was recently the production dramaturg for the UB Theatre productions of Outrage, Fefu and Her Friends, and The Secretaries. For The Secretaries, she developed a dramaturgy zine, a creative practice that she continues to incorporate into both her dramaturgical and scholarly work. She is particularly interested in how theory and practice can be more public-facing, using queer modes of disseminating information like zines to communicate these ideas to audiences and the public at large. She has also collaborated on dramaturgical and design projects with Urban Bush Women (UBW), working with UBW Artistic Director and UB faculty member Chanon Judson. 

 

Teya is the recipient of a Steig Olson scholarship and a UB College of Arts and Sciences Diversity Fellowship.