Full Circle: My Year as Stanford Live's Curatorial Fellow
Against the tumult faced by arts and university spaces over the past year, Stanford Live has steadfastly delivered on its objective to deliver evocative art experiences to the campus community through student masterclasses with world-renowned performance artists. In collaboration with TAPS, the 2025-2026 Stanford Live masterclass series has challenged the chaos of existing as students, artists, and politicized beings by bringing us right to the edge, with circus and experimental theater offerings that push the boundaries of the human body and its expressive capabilities. As Stanford Live’s Curatorial Fellow this year, I had the immense pleasure of helping connect artists across disciplines and around the world to the campus community.
In the fall, we opened our masterclass series with Circa, an Australian contemporary circus company, during their tour of Humans 2.0. After Circa’s original hit presentation of Humans at Stanford in 2018, this masterclass introduced circus movement to community members across academic and movement backgrounds. Working with the unique individual expertise of 10 professional circus artists, over 40 community members had the opportunity to learn fundamental solo acrobatics like tumbling alongside partner and group work. We created towers and pyramids to learn how to build not just with our hands – as Stanford students are so accustomed to doing – but with our entire bodies. Having participated in an Arts Intensive program at Stanford with Circa in 2022 that allowed me to train and perform with the company’s presentation of Leviathan, the masterclass was also a full-circle opportunity to bring a personal transformative experience back to my community to close out my time on campus.
Alongside this movement masterclass, three theater artists and groups presented masterclasses in conjunction with their campus performances from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Continuing in the same vein of expressive high-physicality, Australian theater collective Pony Cam led a Physical Theater Workshop ahead of their show Burnout Paradise, a highly physical ode to the chaos of juggling the responsibilities and stressors of life in the 21st century. Students devised small theater pieces that, like the show itself, were at once serious and irreverent and fun – including a Roble courtyard fountain hop.
Winter brought Leah Shelton’s BATSHIT, whose masterclass on Creating a Solo Show drew experienced and brand-new theater artists alike into a high-energy and intensive workshop that encouraged students to surrender to the consuming and generative power of expression.
Finally, Mark Down of Blind Summit Theatre brought a Puppetry Masterclass alongside their run of The Sex Lives of Puppets, where participants got a chance to manipulate the puppets and coordinate their movements to conjure artificial life – and make it look natural.
With the academic year and artistic season coming to a close, the Stanford Live masterclasses with TAPS this year illustrated the transformative potential of engaging with the arts across backgrounds and experience levels. It was this very capacity for student curiosity, wonder, and joy that drives the Stanford Live engagement teams to bring artists beyond the stage and into the classroom. Having been shaped artistically myself by the student engagement opportunities offered by Stanford Live throughout my five years here, it has been my great honor to help welcome this slate of incredible artists to our community this year.
