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Zoe Ryu

Zoe Ryu
Affiliation Years
2024-2025

Zoe Ryu (she/her) is a director, dramaturg and a scholar of theater, performance, race and affect. Zoe holds an M.A. in English Literature from Seoul National University, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford University's Theater and Performance Studies Department. Inspired by José Esteban Muñoz' "brown feelings," her research interests center racialized forms of feeling. Her dissertation project, tentatively titled, "Ecstatic Care: A Comparative Study in Race, Religion and Performance," examines the works of Black and Korean performing artists whose works are religiously and spiritually informed. Their ecstatic performances of care, where care signifies "an act of political warfare" in Audre Lorde's words, espouse the political efficacy of feeling and healing in minoritarian creative expression. By reclaiming ecstatic performances practiced by artists of color, Zoe's project not only decenters the EuroAmerican canon of the spectral in performance studies, but also the whiteness of affect theory. The project also illustrates the possibility of a Black-Korean relationality based on approximate feelings.