Teresa Simone teaches theatre at the University of Mississippi. She completed her PhD in Theatre in 2023 at Florida State University, where she was a Legacy Fellow. Teresa has won many awards for her scholarship including: William Winter Scholar, Isom Fellow, PEO Scholar, and ASTR’s Helen Krich Chinoy Fellowship for her dissertation, “On the Natchez Confederate Pageant.” Her research uses ecocriticism and phenomenology to study nationalist pageantry, emphasizing bodies, movement, affect, and sensation. She specializes in physical theatre and creating devised and site specific performance.
Teresa worked with the educational theatre company Stories That Soar from 2003-2013 as an actor/director, devising original theatre from stories written by children, to increase community literacy. As the Education Director, she taught playwriting to about 1000 students annually, working with communities to create theatre telling their own stories.
Teresa holds a BA in German Studies with a minor in Gender Studies and an MA in Gender Studies with a concentration in Performance Studies from the University of Arizona, and a Professional Training Certificate from the Dell’Arte International School for Physical Theatre. She has trained with Augusto Boal, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Cornerstone Theatre.
She has several publications available.