Faculty Lunch & Lecture: Assistant Professor Aviva Neff

The Lisska Center is pleased to invite you to its next Faculty Lunch and Lecture, featuring Assistant Professor Aviva Neff, who will talk about her current research. Lunch will be available for registrants at 11:30am and the lecture will begin at 11:45am. 

Drawing from her experience as an historian, theatre maker, and playwright, Neff’s processes explore what responsibilities artists have when generating new work during our so-called “post truth era.” Her praxis embodies individual and community experiences with objective historical artifacts as critical, ethical, resources of remembrance. Put simply, how can we productively honor and engage our emotions, personal connections, and holistic selves when studying, writing, and performing history? How can we introduce the repertoire — oral texts and personal narratives — to the archive — written renderings of history — in order to produce a deeper theatrical relationship between the two?

Neff is an assistant professor of Theatre at Denison University, who has published an introduction to a republication of Danai Gurira’s “The Convert” (2024) and contributed chapters to books such as “Contemporary Black Theater” ( 2023), “August Wilson in Context” (2024), “Applied Theatre and Racial Justice” (2026), and “Dramaturgy and Decolonization in Global Theatre and Performance” (2027). She has multiple forthcoming publications and is a highly sought after intimacy coordinator, Applied Theatre facilitator, and director in the Columbus theatre community and enjoys blending her passion for teaching with a vision for equitable rehearsal and performance spaces.