About Vessel

Rachel Bowditch (PhD/Full Professor of Theatre in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University): Rachel has been creating original devised, site-specific work for over three decades. She has presented her artistic and scholarly work nationally and internationally (Singapore, Buenos Aires, Argentina,  Bogota, Columbia, Santiago, Chile, Berlin, Germany, London, Haikou, China, Mexico City, Montreal, Canada, and Barcelona, Spain), She is one of the seven core Rasaboxes teachers. In 2018, she was a Fellow at the Harvard Mellon Institute for Performance Research in “Public Humanities,” and was featured as one of the “Top 100 Creatives,” by Origins Magazine in 2015. 

Her performance and directing work specializes in devising, site-specific, immersive, mask performance, and physical theatre, and tackles challenging social issues from suicide, addiction, madness, forced relocation, the death penalty, and colonization. Her work has been presented at theatres and venues such as Childsplay, Mixed Blood, Northwest Children's Theatre, the Denver Center, Mesa Arts Center, Phoenix Art Museum, IDEA Museum, and Scottsdale Public Art. 

She is a theatre director and author of four books, On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man (Seagull/University of Chicago Press 2010), Performing Utopia co-edited with Pegge Vissicaro (Seagull/University of Chicago Press 2018), and Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field co-edited with Jeff Casazza and Annette Thornton (Routledge 2018), and most recently Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises with Paula Murray Cole and Michele Minnick (Routledge 2023).

https://www.routledge.com/Inside-The-Performance-Workshop-A-Sourcebook-for-Rasaboxes-and-Other-Exercises/Bowditch-Cole-Minnick/p/book/9781138680029

From 2018-2022, she held the position as the Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University overseeing 8 graduate programs: MFA in Theatre for Youth, MFA in Dance, MFA in Directing, MFA in Performance, MFA in Dramatic Writing, and MFA in Interdisciplinary Digital Media as well as the PhD in Theatre for Youth and PhD in Theatre and Performance of the Americas. From 2014-2022, she directed the MFA in Performance program that focuses on devising, actor-creator methodologies, and new work development. 

She received her BA in Theatre (Directing) from Skidmore College, a certificate of completion from Ecole de Jacques Lecoq International School of Physical Theatre in Paris, France, and her MA and PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. 

To see more of her directing, performance, and scholarly work, www.rachelbowditch.com