THD Announces New Leadership Positions and Celebrates Promotions

As we begin a new academic year, the Department of Theatre and Dance (THD) is pleased and excited to announce new area Directors, as well as the promotion of current staff. 2025-2026 also represents the department's first year under the leadership of new Chair Meredith Conti, PhD.  

The following faculty will be assuming or continuing leadership roles in August:
Associate Department Chair and Producing Director: Lynne Koscielniak
Director of Undergraduate Studies: James Beaudry
Director of Graduate Studies: Kellen Hoxworth, PhD
Director of Theatre: Lindsay Brandon Hunter, PhD
Director of Dance: Anne Burnidge

The department is grateful to these incoming Directors for their willingness to serve in these capacities. The department also would like to thank outgoing Department Chair Eero Laine, PhD, and Directors Jeanne Fornarola, Ariel Nereson, Jon Shimon, and Melanie Aceto for their outstanding leadership over the last three years. 

The THD Production Office has reorganized. We congratulate Ally Hasselback on her promotion to Production Manager and welcome Nick Quinn as Technical Director. Ally Hasselback will also serve as stage management and run crew instructor. 

Dr. Meredith Conti (she/her) is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB) and a historian of nineteenth-century theatre and popular culture in the United States and Britain. Her research variously explores the intersections of theatre and medicine; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular entertainment forms (including world fairs, vaudeville, Wild West shows, and fancy shooting exhibitions); gender and race in the Victorian period; and guns and gun violence in theatre. 

Dr. Conti's first book, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine, was published in 2019 by Routledge. She is the editor of three scholarly volumes: Theatre and the Macabre, co-edited with Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (University of Wales Press, 2022); Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 1: From the Lab to the Streets; and Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 2: From the Curious to the Quantum, the latter two co-edited with Vivian Appler and published with Bloomsbury’s Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues series in 2022 and 2023. Dr. Conti is also working on her second monograph entitled Gunpowder Plots: A Cultural History of Firearms and US Popular Performance, 1849-1929. This new book project has received support from fellowships and grants awarded by the American Society for Theatre Research, the Harry Ransom Center, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, UB’s Gender Institute, and UB’s Humanities Institute. Dr. Conti’s scholarship has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Studies in Musical Theatre, and the edited collection Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture, among others. 

Dr. Conti is the immediate past Vice President for Research and Publications for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the immediate past Secretary of the American Theatre and Drama Society. She has served as book review editor for Theatre Annual and currently serves on the editorial board of Theatre History Studies. Dr. Conti is a member of the Low Carbon Research Methods Workshop, an international and interdisciplinary collective of climate-conscious scholars working toward the development of a greener academy.

A member of the graduate and undergraduate faculty and an affiliate of UB's Gender Institute, Dr. Conti teaches courses on theatre history, historiography, dramaturgy, and performance research, as well as special topics courses on horror theatre and film and violence in performance. For the Department of Theatre and Dance, Dr. Conti has served as the Associate Chair, the Interim Director of Graduate Studies, and the Director of the BA Theatre Program, as well as advising PhD dissertations and MA theses on a variety of topics. Her work in the theatre includes acting, directing, and dramaturgy.

Lynne M. Koscielniak is a Professor of Theatre (Scenography) in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo, where she has taught set and lighting design since 2002. She served as Director of Design and Technology (2005–2014), Department Chair and Producing Director (2013–2019), and has been Associate Chair/Producing Director since 2022. Previously, she held teaching and guest artist roles at Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburgh. A dedicated mentor, she has guided student designers through over 100 full-length productions and received the UB Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring.

Her national contributions include leadership in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF), where she earned the Gold Medallion Award, and active involvement with the United States Institute for Theatre Technology. She has contributed to The Director as Collaborator and Scene Design and Stage Lighting, and co-authored Made by Teams (Routledge, 2023), which explores collaborative design and technical production processes.

As a scenographer, Lynne has over 100 credits across theatre, dance, and installation art, working in set, lighting, projection, props, and scenic art. She held residencies at Steppenwolf Theatre and the Kennedy Center, and is a member of United Scenic Artists Local 829. Her work has represented the U.S. at the Prague Quadrennial and the World Stage Design Exposition.

Based in Buffalo, she is an ensemble member of Road Less Traveled Productions and a member of the Kenan Repertory Company. She has earned multiple Artie Awards for Outstanding Set Design. Her designs have also appeared at ArtPark, Irish Classical Theatre, MusicalFare, Shea’s 710, and more. She is the original set and co-lighting designer for The Nutcracker by Neglia Ballet Artists and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, now in its 16th year at Shea’s Performing Arts Center.

At UB, Lynne co-founded the Great Lakes Climate Theatre Initiative, promoting sustainability through performance. She also serves as a Broadway Green Alliance Green Captain.

Lynne holds a BA in Theater with Honors from Buffalo State University and a Master of Fine Arts in Stage Design from Northwestern University.

James Beaudry (he/him) is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Music Theatre with the department of Theatre and Dance. He has served as Producing Artistic Director for the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre, on the senior staff of New York Stage and Film as Company Manager for their annual Powerhouse Season of new plays and musicals in various stages of development. Prior to that, James served for eight years as Artistic Director of Timber Lake Playhouse in Illinois.  

James has directed, choreographed or produced more than 125 productions. A proud member of SDC, his directing and choreography credits include the world premieres of Mark Twain’s Blues (Off-Broadway) and Jason & Ben (NYMF), as well as choreography for Pride & Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre, the Chicago premiers of Heathers the Musical (Jeff Award nomination for outstanding direction of a musical), Murder Ballad (Jeff Award nomination for outstanding direction of a musical) & Meet John Doe. 

Additional directing and choreography credits include Other Desert Cities, To Master The Art (Theatre of Western Springs), Sweeney Todd, Aspects of Love, The Most Happy Fella and Pump Boys & Dinettes (Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre), Lucky Stiff and Triumph of Love (The Music Theatre Company), West Side Story (CUNY 50th Anniversary Production), Anything Goes, Into The Woods, Chicago, Cats, Sunset Boulevard, Children of Eden, Big Fish, Titanic, Evita, Carousel, The Wedding Singer, Hair, Constellations, All Shook Up and Sister Act. 

James served on the directing team for Leo Burnett’s Leo On Ice, an original, Broadway-scale rock opera that premiered at the historic Chicago Theatre as a throwback to the corporate industrials of the mid to late 20th Century. The project was shortlisted for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in the category of Branded Content & Entertainment. 

As an educator, James has taught for the acclaimed Tada! Youth Theatre in New York City. He has had the privilege to spend time in residence as a guest artist and Director with Baldwin Wallace University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, North Central College and The College of Wooster. James has also served as a peer reviewer for Oxford University Press, Dance & Music Division.  

Kellen Hoxworth (he/they) is Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. His academic interests focus on the intersections between performance, race, and coloniality, particularly in African and Black diasporic performance. His first monograph Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance traces the transnational circulations of blackface minstrelsy and related forms of racialized performance from the prerevolutionary circum-Atlantic world through the nineteenth-century Anglophone imperium. Transoceanic Blackface received an Honorable Mention for the 2025 John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. His writing has been published in American Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Review, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey. He has also published chapters in several edited volumes, including The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism, The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook on Theatre and Migration, Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia, and Dance in US Popular Culture. His essay “The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman” was selected by the American Society for Theatre Research as the recipient of the Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American theatre, drama, and/or performance studies.

An affiliate of the Department of Africana and American Studies and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on performance history and theory, including courses on his research specializations in Black theatre and performance and performance in/from the global south.

Lindsay Brandon Hunter is Assistant Professor of Theatre.  She holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU and a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA, where she was awarded a 2012 teaching fellowship from the Colloquium of University Teaching Fellows and the 2011 Aaron Curtis Taylor Memorial Scholarship.  Her current research project focuses on performances of authenticity and realness in intermedial theater, reality television, and immersive and pervasive gaming.  Her published work includes a chapter on alternate reality gaming in the forthcoming Framing Immersive Theatre and Performance (Palgrave) and essays and reviews in Text & Presentation and Theatre Survey.  She is also a past editor of UCLA’s Extensions: The Online Journal of Embodiment and Technology.

Hunter’s performance credits include work with Annex Theatre in Seattle, the Asolo Repertory Theatre, iO West, and the New York Neo-Futurists, where she remains a company member.  Some of her plays and monologues are collected in 225 Plays by the New York Neo-Futurists from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and New Monologues for Women by Women volumes I and II (Heinemann).

Anne Burnidge is a dancer, dance-maker and educator. As the Director of Anne Burnidge Dance she has choreographed over 20 works, which have been presented nationally and internationally in New York City, Chicago, Colorado, Connecticut, Michigan, West Virginia, Toronto, Mexico and Taiwan. In addition to performing in her own work, she has danced in works by dance luminaries Bebe Miller, Meredith Monk, Jacques D’Amboise and Maguy Marin. Many of her choreographic works explore the intersections of dance and science. Her 2018 collaborative project, Balancing Act, investigates the human microbiome and implications for environmental sustainability. This multidisciplinary art exhibit, supported by the UB GEM Community of Excellence, was presented at the Buffalo Museum of Science to over 600 audience members, and a companion article detailing the educational outreach component of the project, Dancing our Microbiome at the Science Museum: A Dance/STEAM Collaboration, was published in the Journal of Dance Education. Other recent works include To Tricia with Love and A Tribute to Merce, honoring modern dance giants Merce Cunningham and Tricia Brown, presented at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in collaboration with the Buffalo Chamber Players. She also regularly creates collaborative works with UB graduate and undergraduate students, most recently Inside Repetition, a dance-poetry-film project exploring disability access in dance on film, with UB Distinguished Visiting Scholar Eli Clare. This research was presented at the 2021 NDEO National Conference.

Burnidge’s scholarly research integrates theories and practices from somatics, dance science and culturally relevant and critical pedagogies to develop healthy, holistic dance education and training methodologies. She regularly presents her research at conferences including the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science (IADMS), Dance Studies Association, and the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO). Burnidge’s teaching focuses on educating the whole person, and she specializes in teaching somatic-based contemporary dance and ballet technique, dance-making, anatomy and kinesiology for dancers, and Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis. She was the inaugural recipient of the NDEO Top Paper Citation for her article Somatics in the Dance Studio: Embodying Feminist/Democratic Pedagogy; a nominee for IADMS’s Dance Educator of the Year Award; and has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts to develop and present her creative work. Her teaching credits include The Ohio State University, The College at Brockport (SUNY), University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Columbia College Chicago. She was honored to serve on the Board of Directors of the American College Dance Association from 2008 to 2014. She has served on the organizing board for the Dance Science and Somatics Educators Organization since 2009 and has twice organized and hosted their conference, most recently at UB in 2018.

Ally Hasselback (she/her) is very excited to join UB's Department of Theatre and Dance as an Assistant Production Manager. She is an Equity Stage Manager, who, over the past 13 years, has worked in the professional theatre scenes of Boston, Pittsburgh, Omaha, Norfolk, and Wichita.

She has experience stage managing and calling for dance, theatre, musical theatre, opera, devised works, new productions, and live events. Most recently, she was a 2023 Season Stage Manager for Music Theatre Wichita's productions of Beauty and the Beast, Ragtime and CATS. She is very excited to return home to Buffalo, and join the incredible Production Team at the Department of Theatre and Dance. Some of her favorite hobbies include spending time with her family, going on hikes, attending baseball games, and starting netflix shows, but never finishing them.

Nicholas Quinn (he/him) is excited to be part of The Department of Theatre and Dance at UB. He has received his BA from Slippery Rock University and his MFA from Ohio University. He has been working in education for the last 15 years and has maintained a successful freelance career both locally and nationally.  He hopes to bring his years of teaching and freelance experience to The University at Buffalo to help students get a start in this industry.

THD also welcomes new Adjunct Instructors Hannah D'Elia and Joelle Lachance. D'Elia will assist with Scene Shop Supervision while Lachance will provide vocal lessons.

Congratulations also to Adjunct Instructors Samantha Campanile and Ian Downes who are returning to teach DAC 213 MAJ Ballet 1 to Dance Majors and Basic Acting 1, respectively.