Bay-Cheng to present research in Croatia

Sarah Bay-Cheng, associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance and director of UB’s Techne Institute for Arts and Emerging Technologies, will join leading scholars in the field in presenting cutting-edge research at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, later this month.

Her visit will be funded by a Promoting American Arts and Education Grant from the U.S. Embassy in Croatia, which encourages the sharing of American values and supports cultural dialogue between the American and Croatian publics. It also will be supported in part by the government of Croatia.

Bay-Cheng will be one of five U.S. scholars representing front-line research in theater and performance studies who will address faculty members and students at the Academy of Drama Arts at the University of Zagreb. Also presenting research will be colleagues from Columbia University, Stanford University and Northwestern University.

Bay-Cheng’s public lecture will focus on the ways digital technologies intersect in contemporary performance and dramaturgies, and in particular, how contemporary theater artists use digital media in performance.

She also will direct seminars for dramaturgy students in which they will learn how digital tools like video recordings, annotation software and interactive archives can be used to study past performances and create new ones.

Bay-Cheng, whose most recent book is “Avante-Gardes in Performance” (Palgrave MacMillan Press, 2012), is director of graduate studies for UB’s MA and PhD theatre and performance programs.

She also is a founding member of the Intermedia Performance Studio at UB, an experimental performance collaboration that integrates virtual reality, artificial intelligence and live performance.

She is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Media Study, the Poetics Program in the Department of English and the Department of Global Gender Studies.