Research Interests

Auto/biographical Perfomance
Auto/ethnography
Feminist Theatre
Intimacy Practices
Trauma-informed Practices
Applied Theatre
Theatre in the Pandemic(s)
Practice as Research
Directing

Publications

Lipkin, Joan, and Kasey Lynch. “Writing Climate Justice: Personal Storytelling and Source Material Devising as Embodied Methodology.” Embodied Playwriting: Improv and Acting Exercises for Writing and Devising, edited by Hillary Haft Bucs and Charissa Menefee, Routledge, 2023.

Lynch, Kasey. “Theater and Human Flourishing edited by Harvey Young (review).” Theatre Journal [Forthcoming]

Lynch, Kasey. "Performed Ethnography and Communication: Improvisation and Embodied Experience by D. Soyini Madison (review)." Theatre Topics vol. 29, no. 2, 2019, pp. 179-180.

Conference
Presentations

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

Panel Performer. “‘Some(where?) That's Green," - Performance Studies Division. National Communication Association (NCA), New Orleans, LA, November.

Invited Performer. “Cicadas,” by Stacey Isom Campbell. New Play Development Workshop. Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Atlanta, GA, August.

Panel Participant. “Finding the Body in Body Politic: Rehearsing Feminist Collectivity in the Covid-19 Era.” Performance Studies International (PSi), London, England, June.

Panel Participant. “’You are Alive, You are Whole’: Staging Trauma, Time, and Crip Futurities in Outlander.” Top Student Papers - Theatre and New Media Division. National Communication Association (NCA), National Harbor, MD, November.

Panel Convener and Performer. “Rehearsing Feminist Revolutions.” Charting Systemic Injustice on the Body: Orienting (Auto)biographical Performance Toward Liberation - Theatre and New Media Division. National Communication Association (NCA), National Harbor, MD, November.

Panel Participant. “The Responsibility to Remember and the Freedom to Forget: Responding to Memory on the Move.” Performance Studies Division. National Communication Association (NCA), National Harbor, MD, November.

Roundtable Participant. “Building Community with Embodied Playwriting.” Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Austin, TX, August.

Panel Participant. “Learning to be Director in a Pandemic: Autoethnographic Reflections on my Directing Journey.” International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), Urban-Champaign, IL, May.

Panel Performer. “‘Do You Dream of Guillotines?’: What France Means to Me.” Memory on the Move - Performance Studies Division. National Communication Association (NCA), New Orleans, LA, November.

Panel Chair. “Academics as Tik Tok Artists.” Theatre and New Media Division. National Communication Association (NCA), New Orleans, LA, November.

Panel Performer. “Voices of Arrow Rock.” Missouri Conference on History, March- Virtual.

Invited Performer. “Songs of a Queer Catholic Choir Girl.” Student Division. National Communication Association (NCA), November- Virtual

Panel Participant. “Navigating the Teaching-self: Women Graduate Instructors’ Experiences Teaching Studio-style Courses.” Narratives Post-Combustion. Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), August- Virtual

Panel Participant. “‘Cherie are you still there?’: Presence and Embodied Becoming in every.single.one.” Women’s and Gender Studies Graduate Student Conference, Columbia, MO, March- Cancelled.

Panel Performer. “Body Talk: An Autoethnographic Inquiry into A Female Villanova Experience.” Doing Autoethnographic Performance to Survive – Performance Studies Division. National Communication Association (NCA), Baltimore, MD, November.

Panel Participant. “Negotiating Power in the Classroom: An Exploration of the Experience of Female First-time Graduate Instructors.” Women’s and Gender Studies Graduate Student Conference, Columbia, MO, March.

Current Research Excerpt

"Rehearsing Revolution:

An Auto/ethnographic Mapping of Feminist Theatre Making in the Pandemic(s)"

My research responds to a lack of attention to mental and physical health in the rehearsal room, and the idea that actors can divorce their personal gendered, racialized, and embodied experience from themselves when they enter the rehearsal space. The need for more theorized and practical trauma-informed and health-conscious tools for theatre creation has been amplified for me as I continue growing as an artist-scholar in a time of precarity. I started my theatre life as a performer, strictly acting in musical theatre productions. In 2018, I began expanding my identity as an artist scholar by exploring my performer self, but also my emerging director, researcher, and pedagog selves. This exploration began, and continues, amidst what I will call the multiple pandemics. The term “pandemic” continues to be defined and redefined amidst the COVID-19 crisis, and has been elusive for much longer.

Upon a google search of “definition of pandemic,” I found many definitions and multiple sources attempting to track the histories of the term and its relatedness to terms like “outbreak,” “endemic,” and “epidemic” (“Epidemic, Endemic, Pandemic: What are the Differences?” 2021). Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and medical figurehead during the COVID-19 crisis, co-wrote an article in 2009 in which he and his colleagues conclude, “simply defining a pandemic as a large epidemic may make ultimate sense in terms of comprehensibility and consistency. We also suggest that use of the term is best reserved for infectious disease” (1020). With the multiple and varying understandings of what constitutes a pandemic, and the vague defining of “disease”, I will define pandemic as a public health crisis with global-reaching effects. Such crises include, but are not limited to, the Covid-19 crisis, climate change, systemic violence towards BIPOC and minoritarian peoples, and the loss of bodily autonomy along the lines of gender.

I attempt to define “pandemic,” because it is through becoming a theatre practitioner in a time of precarity, specifically 2018 through the present, that my own feminist theatre praxis has come to be defined. Theatre making in this cultural moment is intimately connected to these public health crises, and has helped me critically consider my relationship to my own body as an actor entering rehearsal spaces, and as a director, teacher, and facilitator interacting with other humans and their bodies.