About Jacquelyn:
Jacquelyn Marie Shannon is a theatre, dance, and ritual artist and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City interested in magic, witchcraft, and ritual; theatres of death, haunting, and mourning; queer and feminist performance; materiality, affect, and dramaturgies of the body. Her work gravitates towards questions of presence and transformation, enchantment and whimsy, the supernatural and the extraordinary, spirituality and sensuality, and the tenuous relationship between life and death. She is intrigued by how performance conjures, making the invisible visible, apprehendable, or encounterable, and how people are moved and make meaning within the sometimes blurred line between stage magic and ritual magic, spectacle and spirit.
As both a scholar and practitioner, Jacquelyn is especially drawn to performance and artistic process which engages witches, ghosts, spiritualism and seance, necromancy, western esotericism and the occult, thaumaturgy, animism, shamanism, puppetry, vaudeville, sideshow, as well as other queer or marginal registers of performance that extend beyond bounded notions of body, space and time, that cultivate and operate as and through liminal and altered states, alternative temporalities, synesthesia, visions and dreams.
Jacquelyn holds an MA degree from Indiana University in Communication and Culture where she studied expressive modalities through theories of affect, performance, and visual and embodied rhetoric, as well as an MA degree from NYU in Educational Theatre where she researched process-oriented and affect-informed theatre education, and an MPhil from The Graduate Center CUNY in Theatre and Performance where she studied histories and dramaturgies of magic, enchantment, witchcraft, and the supernatural in performance.
As an artist-teacher-scholar, she has performed, presented research, and led workshops across the US and internationally. Her writing appears in published articles and edited volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2020) and The Witch Studies Reader (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2024).
Over the last nine years, Jacquelyn has developed and taught “Ghostly Practice,” a constellation of movement and ritual techniques for working with memory, haunting, spirit, and the more-than-human through the body, heavily informed by over fifteen years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, physical and psychodramatic theatre, ritual practice and performance.
Jacquelyn is currently a graduate teaching fellow at City University of New York (CUNY) where she enjoys teaching courses in theatre, acting and performance. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Allegheny College, Indiana University, and the New York City College of Technology, and has lectured and led classes at Barnard College at Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, and Hunter College, among other institutions.
Beyond academia, Jacquelyn is also a certified integrative hypnotist who works primarily with artists, performers, and other creatives to overcome creative and emotional blocks, process and alchemize grief, and re-enchant their daily lives.
