Nick Fesette is a civically engaged scholar and theatre maker. He earned his B.A. in Theatre and Creative Writing magna cum laude from Hamilton College, and studied abroad at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio.
Since 2013, Fesette has helped facilitate The Phoenix Players Theatre Group, a transformative community of writers and performers currently incarcerated in Auburn Correctional Facility, the oldest continually functional maximum-security prison in the United States. His scholarly interests include prison studies, theatre and social change, critical theory, physical theatre, popular culture, acting and directing, and modern dramatic literature. His dissertation research examines the connections between embodied performance and radical politics in and around the American penitentiary. His writings on prison theatre, hunger strikes, and zombies are published in the online journals Etudes and Rejoinder. He’s also been the instructor of record for several first-year writing seminars focused on crime and punishment, prison art-making, and dramatic literature, and has served as TA for courses on theatre practice at both Cornell and Hamilton.
In the Schwartz Center, Fesette assistant directed Eric Overmyer’s On the Verge, played the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie, and co-authored Friedrich Schiller’s Bad Girls Club as part of the AGIT Lab. He’s next preparing to direct Naomi Wallace’s Trestle at Pope Lick Creek as part of PMA’s main stage series. As a theatre artist in New York City he performed with companies like Theater Reconstruction Ensemble and dance-theatre group Company XIV, in addition to collaboratively creating new work in many spaces downtown, including Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, Theater for the New City, Walkerspace, Horse Trade Theater Group, TheaterLAB, and the Incubator Arts Project (formerly the Ontological-Hysteric).
More information can be found by stalking him on social media and/or on his website: nickfesette.net