Professor Nielsen is active in experimental criticisms that address the intersections of the performing arts, politics, and the state. For her next research project, Nielsen is researching performance/art practices in theatre and dance that find ways to document issues in culture and rights managements. Another project, Sacrifice Plays: The Riddle of Labor and Performance,theorizes the work of counterconquest performance in Dominican baseball. Professor Nielsen serves on the Steering Committees of the Critical Theory Concentration, the Latin American Studies Program, and the Humanitarianism and Human Rights Concentration.

Professor Nielsen is co-editor of Global Theatres and Neoliberalism: Performance Permutations (forthcoming, Palgrave). 

AREAS OF RESEARCH AND TEACHING EXPERTISE

Performance Studies; Critical Theory; Critiques of Subjectivity, Movement, and the State; Modernism and the International Avante-Gardes, especially in the Americas; Gender and Feminist criticism; Oral History; Documentary Theory.

MACALESTER COURSES

Theatre and Performance in the Twin Cities 
Introduction to Theatre Studies
Sources of Global Performance
Performance Studies Praxis
Performance Theory Seminar
Performance/Documents/Rights
The Oral History Project
Rights and Resistance: Latin American Theatre and Film
Feminist Theatres

OTHER COURSES TAUGHT

Contemporary Latin@ Performance
Sports Performances
Theatre and Globalization
Theatre and the Law
Latin American and Latin@ Literatures

Awards and Honors

In 2010, Lara was nominated for the Best Educator award by the Macalester College Student Council. When Lara was in the Department of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, her teaching was honored with the David Payne Carter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006. Prior to NYU, Lara was also a Fellow with The Five College's Crossroads in the Studies of the Americas (CISA), where she taught at Hampshire and Amherst Colleges, in Western Massachusetts.

PUBLICATIONS

Global Theatres and Neoliberalism: Performance Permutations, (forthcoming, Palgrave) (coeditor)

Sacrifice Plays: The Riddle of Labor and Performance (manuscript in process)

"Heterotopic Transgressions and Interventions: the (Il)liberal Neoliberal," Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra, eds. Global Theatres and Neoliberalism: Performance Permutations (forthcoming, Palgrave)

“Working the Field with Oral History: Talking Towards the Research Encounter in Theatre and Performance Studies,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 2009 

"Specters of Exchange: Rights and Resources in Loisaida Liberation Theology Passion Play Performance," Performance Research,  2009

"The Oral History Project: Practice-Based Research in Theatre and Performance" in Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, edited by Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter. Palgrave 2008

“Institutionalizing Ensembles: Thinking Theatre, Performance, and ‘The Law,’” in Law, Culture, and the Humanities Vol. 4, No. 2, 156-178, 2008

“Globalization and the Work of Theatre” Contemporary Theatre Review v16 n 1, special issue on Theatre and Globalization, February 2006

“Baseball as Cultural Policy: The Law and the Anomaly of Performance,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society v 29, 2003

“Garbage, Gone,” Women & Performance September 2002

REVIEWS:

TDR Book Review (2012): Performing South Africa's Truth Commission: Stages of Transition, by Catherine M. Cole, Indiana University press 2009

e-misférica book review (2011): Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, by Rebecca Schneider

Theatre Journal Book Review (2011): Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class, by David Savran

TDR book review (2011): Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico, by Patricia Ybarra 

TDR book review (2007): Tree: belief/culture/balance, by Ralph Lemon

Theater Journal performance review (2005): “Charlie Victor Romeo”

Theatre Journal book review (1996): Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America by Taylor and Villegas, 1994; El Teatro Campesino: Theatre in the Chicano Movement by Broyles-González 1994; Hispanic Theatre in New York by de la Roche 1995

LINKS

ASTR (http://www.astr.org/)
ATHE (http://www.athe.org/)
PSi (http://psi-web.org/)
LASA (http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/)
ASA (http://www.theasa.net/)
MLA (http://www.mla.org/)

FOUNDATIONAL TRAINING/EDUCATION

PhD: Performance Studies, New York University

MA: Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota (and the program in Feminist and Gender Studies)