Overview
Kale(y) Makino is a poet, director, transformative justice educator, and budding green thumb hailing from Detroit, Michigan.
Her main fields of interest are theatre, sociolinguistics, and gender studies, with emphases on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and ecofeminist criticism. Her thesis project, The Allegory of Boy: tracing a channel of social informants policing attraction in Turned Out, examined the intersection of androcentrism and racialization in the prison industrial complex to perform a comparative reading of how patriarchal ideology in the U.S. justice system produces conditions of exploitation. Specifically, through recourse to feminist and psychoanalytic theory, she analyzes literary and cinematic narratives of violence to consider how misogyny and racism shape the production of social hierarchies.
Kaley earned her BA in English Literature and Law, Justice, and Social Change from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She matriculated into UM’s Accelerated Master’s Program in Transcultural Studies, from which she received her MA in Interdisciplinary Humanities. While at UM, Kaley directed Patchwork: the unraveling gender binary for UM’s Students for Reproductive Rights organization; she served as the Program Assistant for the Community Circle Program through the Office of Conflict Resolution; she worked as a member of the Prison Creative Arts Project leading weekly performing arts workshops at Jackson Penitentiary; and sat as the first-elected Graduate Student Representative on the Board of Transcultural Studies.
Kaley received a Postgraduate Research Award from the University of Cardiff for the European Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Triennial Conference (2020); and in 2022, was recognized by the Danish National School of Performing Arts for being an outstanding contributor to field for advancements in queer scholarship.
Prior to attending Cornell, Kaley worked on the Development Team of Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, and a loving steward to a plot of wild blackberries at her Trumansburg home.