PhD - Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara - 2024
Dr. Maiza Laurent Hixson
Visiting Assistant Professor – Visual and Performing Arts
Dr. Hixson is an interdisciplinary theater scholar, curator, and artist whose research bridges the fields of theater, dance, and performance studies with discourses on curating, art, politics, and placemaking.
Professional Preparation
MFA - Fine Arts
University of California, Santa Barbara - 2019
University of California, Santa Barbara - 2019
MA - Critical and Curatorial Studies
University of Louisville - 2005
University of Louisville - 2005
- Art & Art History
School of the Art Institute of Chicago - 2001
School of the Art Institute of Chicago - 2001
BA - French
University of Louisville - 2001
University of Louisville - 2001
Research Areas
Contemporary Theatre, Performance Art, Acting, Directing, Playwriting, Visual Culture, Painting, Museum Studies, Public Art, Curatorial Practice, Cities as Social and Spatial Practice, Urban Memory and HistoriographyPublications
Agonism in the Artistic City: Choreographies of Protest and Placemaking, Dissertation, UC Santa Barbara 2024 - Dissertation
“Transgressing Aesthetic Borders: Art, Sex & Marriage in Santa Barbara’s Courthouse Murals” 2022 - Journal Article
Awards
Professional Travel & Development Grant - University of Texas at Dallas [2024]
Academic Senate Doctoral Travel Award - University of California, Santa Barbara [2023]
Doctoral Scholars Fellowship - University of California, Santa Barbara [2023]
Visual, Performing, and Media Arts Award - Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UC Santa Barbara [2019]
Regents Fellowship - UC Santa Barbara [2017]
Curatorial Grant - Andy Warhol Foundation [2012]
Presentations
"The Art of New Media Theatre: Staging Site-Specific Performances from the Black Box to Augmented Spaces and Beyond"
2025/04–2025/04 Job Talk, University of Texas at Dallas“Big Bourbon: Arts Funding in an Ecosystem of Plantation Urbanism”
2024/11–2024/11 American Society for Theatre Research Conference (Arts Infrastructures and Ecologies Working Group), Seattle, WA"Voices in Action: How Luis Valdez’s ‘Acto’ Method Inspires Student Discourse on Politics, Culture, and Society"
2024/11–2025/11 “The Global Impact of Pop Culture: Voices from Canada, the United States, and Europe,” Conference, University of Regina, Canada“A Fluid Assembly: Bourbon Distillery Tour”
2025/06–2025/06 Performance Studies international Conference #29, London, UK“Counterhegemonic Choreographies of Place”
2025/05–2025/05 Border Crossings Conference Talk, UC Santa BarbaraIn addition to “Jim Crow” Laws that segregated Southern U.S. cities well into the mid-twentieth- century, Urban Renewal operated in tandem with interstate highway construction to literally pave the way for what became known as “Negro Removal” and “white flight”. The United States government initiated Urban Renewal as a program to address so-called “blighted” city neighborhoods across the country. It was a post-World War II urban planning objective designed to demolish urban sites under eminent domain to accommodate new highways, the increased presence of cars, and ostensibly provide affordable housing. In Louisville, twentieth-century legacies of segregation and Urban Renewal remain as living archives that perpetuate twenty-first-century racial and spatial borders. Katherine Dunham: “Won’t Play Louisville” connects the Black modern dancer's historic resistance to today’s urban context where spatial divisions still haunt Kentucky’s largest city. As a critical intervention, Hixson argues how Dunham’s protest of segregated auditorium space laid the foundation for contemporary choreographies of anti-racist placemaking.