ABOUT
Sophie Capobianco (they/them/theirs) is an interdisciplinary performance scholar researching and writing on subjects of prefigurative politics, critical carceral studies, Black and decolonial studies, social movements, and performance art. Their previous work has explored racialization and social worlds, anticolonial social movements, queer geographies and labor, borders and borderlands, Indigenous representation in anthropological museums, and radical/revolutionary political organization throughout modern U.S. history. Their Master’s Essay, “Utopia in D Yard: Prefigurative Politics and the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971,” argues for a political theory of performative prefiguration, now the central focus of their theoretical work. This essay was selected as the 2024 winner of TDR’s Student Essay Contest its publication is forthcoming in The Drama Review. Sophie is a PhD student in Culture and Performance in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. They graduated with their M.A. in Theater and Performance Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, where they were the Head of Academic Research for Prison Education Project. They have also been an Organizing Fellow with the anti-racist climate justice organization Divest Ed and the Student Coordinator for WashU’s Reparative Performance Studies Working Group on minoritatian representation in Theatre and Performance Studies.
Los Angeles, CA
sophiecapo [at] ucla.edu
sophieecapobianco [at] gmail.com
wacd.ucla.edu/people/graduate-students/sophie-capobianco