Artist Bio

Rachel Bowditch, MA/PhD is a performer, theatre director, performance studies scholar, and an assistant professor in the School of Theatre and Film at Arizona State University. She has a unique international background growing up and living overseas for 18 years. A U.S. citizen but born in Rome, Italy she lived in Italy for 5 years, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for 2 1/2 years, Jakarta, Indonesia for six months, Singapore for eight years, Tel Aviv, Israel for 2 years, London for six months, Paris, France for one year, Upstate New York for 3 years, New York City for seven years and Phoenix, Arizona for 3 years. Living in Asia and Europe during her formative years and her extensive international travels to Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Egypt, Kenya, Germany, Austria, France, Holland, England, Turkey, Greece, Malaysia, Bali, Indonesia, Thailand, Maldives and Japan has deeply connected her to a theater far removed from American Realism.

Her book, On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man was recently published as part of the Enactments Series (Seagull Press/University of Chicago Press). Her work has been published in Puppetry International "Dancing with Fire: The Ultimate Effigy" and the Journal of Religion and Theatre "Temple of Tears: Revitalizing and Inventing Ritual in the Burning Man Community in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada." She is co-editing the Rasaboxes Source Book with Paula Murray Cole with various contributors such as Richard Schechner, Michele Minnick, and others. 

She was an Institute for Humanities Research Fellow (2009/2010) at Arizona State University with Pegge Vissicaro (Associate Chair of Dance) and Tracy Fessenden (Associate Professor of Religious Studies) for their book project Festive Performance: Staging Identity, Politics, and Utopia in the Americas.

She has presented her scholarship at conferences in the U.S., Singapore, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and London. As the artistic director of Vessel, her innovative use of multi-media in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal was depicted in American Theatre, Jan. 2009 and her original devised work, The Ophelia Project in Live Design, Oct. 2008.

Her studies at Skidmore College, the British American Drama Academy (BADA), Dell’ Arte School of Physical Theatre, Ecole de Jacques Lecoq International School of Physical Theatre, Suzuki and Viewpoints with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, and becoming a certified instructor in the rasaboxes actor training technique in 2008 have helped her move toward achieving her vision of theater. She received her Masters degree and Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU in 2006.
 
Her devised an original work, The Ophelia Project: A Poetic Portrait of the Lives and Writing of Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath produced by Arizona Women’s Theatre Company at Taliesin West, the Frank Lloyd Wright Institute in 2009. She received an Arizona Commission on the Arts grant and a Herberger College Research and Creative Activity Grant for the development and touring of The Ophelia Project. The set was designed by Taliesin apprentices Daniel Dillow and Huiee Wong with installation art by Saskia Jorda and Simon de Aguero. The show was first presented at the Lyceum Theatre at ASU and the Phoenix Fringe Festival 2008 and then toured to the Philadelphia Live Arts/Fringe Festival 2008. 

At ASU she has directed Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, Naomi Iizuka’s Anon(ymous) and Deborah Stein's Bone Portraits on the Galvin Mainstage. She has served as choreographer and movement coach for Salomon Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories directed by Irma Duricko, Cardid Svich’s Iphigenia Crash Lands Falls on the Neon Shell that Once was her Heart directed by Lance Gharavi, House Where Nobody Lives directed by Guillermo Reyes, Bridge to the Stars directed by Bill Partlan, Dreaming Darwin by Lance Gharavi, and In the Penal Colony directed by Kyle Lewis.

In New York City, she directed A Woman’s Place by Susan Riskin at HERE Performing Arts Center, NYC, City of Bells: An Adaptation of the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg at HERE Performing Arts Center, NYC, Mastaba, at the American Living Room Festival, HERE Performing Arts Center 2000; and Arcana at the Ontological-Hysteric Downstairs Series 2002.  She has directed and performed in Vessel’s ongoing interactive urban performance Transfix since 1996, which has been seen at over thirty festivals and venues across the U.S. including the Mesa Center for Contemporary Arts, Scottsdale Museum of Modern Art, the New York International Independent Film/Video Festival at Madison Square Garden, NYC, GenArt Summer Arts Festival, the New York International Fringe Al Fresco at Central Park and Grand Central, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, The Kitchen, the HOWL Festival 2004, the UnConvention 2004, Performance Studies International #11 at Brown University, Phoenix Fringe Festival, and the ASU Art Museum. 

As an artistic associate of East Coast Artists, she performed in Yokastas (2003) and Yokastas Redux (2005) directed by Richard Schechner at LaMaMa Annex. A certified rasaboxes instructor, she has studied and assisted in rasaboxes presentations and workshops with Schechner, Cole, and Minnick since 2002. As an education associate of RoseLee Goldberg's Performa, she was the liaison between Performance Studies international and Performa 07 in 2007 and worked with Performa for several years organizing Performa 05. She also has worked as an actor with award winning psychologist Paul Ekman (Author of Emotions Revealed) and was featured in his March 2005 National Geographic article on the Mind.

She is the founder of M.O.V.E. (Movement. Observation. Vision. Experimentation) Arizona Laboratory for Movement Research Winter Intensive at ASU in collaboration with Sara Romersberger and the Association for Theatre Movement Educators (ATME). 
 
 For more information about her early work, visit:
 <http://Www.vesselproject.org>