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Samuel Yates
Samuel Yates, Ph.D., is a deaf artist and researcher who is currently assistant professor of theatre and performance studies in the School of Theatre and Dance at Millikin University. Their current book project, Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability in the American Musical (in-progress), investigates disability aesthetics and accessibility practices in Broadway musicals by asking how our notions of disability and the able body inform and transform the work of the labouring actor in commercial theatre. As a dramaturg and theatremaker, they have collaborated with companies such as the Abbey Theatre, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, the Kennedy Center, the Samuel Beckett Centre, GALA Hispanic Theatre and New Harmony Theater. Beyond the theatre, Samuel has worked as an arts and accessibility consultant with Gensler Architecture, the National Endowment for the Arts and 3Arts Chicago. Their work on disability, performance and popular culture is published or forthcoming in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Music Theatre Today, Studies in Musical Theatre and Medicine and Literature, as well as in edited volumes such as The Matter of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2019), A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Social Disqualification (Routledge, 2022).
Contact: Millikin University, 1184 W. Main Street, Decatur, IL 62522, USA.