Carlos Salazar-Zeledón is a theatre artist and doctoral candidate in Drama, History & Theory at the UW, and is writing a dissertation on religious performance traditions in Central America, based on postcolonial theory with an ethnographic approach. He obtained his BA and his Graduate Diploma at the University of Costa Rica, where he had ten years of teaching experience in the undergraduate program of the Drama School. Working simultaneously as a director, dramaturg and researcher, his artistic work explores the contemporary staging of classic texts using an interdisciplinary approach whilst his research examines the contemporary religious public performances in Latin America (pilgrimages, processions and enactments). His interdisciplinary projects also look at the Spanish Golden Age and the Spanish Modernism focusing specifically on their influences in Latin American theatre. He is the recipient of the 2019-20 Arlene Hunter Scholarship (UW), as well as the School of Drama’s Barry Whitman Research Grant (2019). His articles and reviews are published in Paso de Gato (Mexico), and the Texas Journal of Theatre.
Ellen Chang is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media at the UW, and is writing a dissertation on the transactional encounter between contemporary Taiwanese video art/installation, cinema, and popular culture as processes of aesthetic decolonization. Her recent work on sound and audio walks sees this relationship as borne out of Taiwan’s complex historical relationship with China. As a simultaneous film scholar and art curator/practitioner, she is moving towards more engaged, sensitive, and practical understandings of how multimedia art reflects the (re-)occurring themes of everyday politics across international geographies. Her project, “Untitled Vignettes: Multisensory Encounter, Audiovisual Symphony, and the Contemporary Multimedia Art of Taiwan,” received the 2019 Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship from the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities. She is currently the committee member of the UW Taiwan Studies’ 2020 workshop, Land/scaping Taiwan (Non-)Humans, Environment, and Moments of Encounter, and the managing editor for Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal.