Nicholas Fesette

Nicholas Fesette is an Associate Professor of Theater at Emory University, with a career spanning over 50 productions across professional, academic, and community-based settings. At Oxford, he directed notable works such as Circle Mirror Transformation and The Arsonists, alongside pandemic-era digital projects like Fragments and Connections and the Isolation Performance Project.

• Education: BA from Hamilton College (2009), MA (2016) and PhD (2018) from Cornell University.

His research focuses on critical prison studies, abolitionism, and theater for social justice, examining how performance interacts with race, class, and carceral systems. He draws on five years of collaboration with the Phoenix Players Theatre Group, a company of incarcerated artists at Auburn Correctional Facility.

Recent publications include analyses of abolitionist performance strategies (2024) and contributions to Race and Performance After Repetition (2020). His 2025 review of Freeman's Challenge critiques prison-for-profit systems, while collaborative works like the Abolition in Theater & Performance Zine (2024) highlight collective scholarship.

Teaching courses such as Prison Media and Performance and Theater for Social Justice, Fesette bridges academic and activist practices through projects like the Decarcerating the University roundtable (2024). His work interrogates the paradox of performance as both a tool of resistance and a mechanism of oppression.