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)"

ABSTRACT

Over the last five years, I have been exploring my embodied experience of becoming a feminist director in the academy. I began directing fully-staged theatrical works amidst the height of the COVID-19 pandemic with a digital production of Charlotte’s Web in the Summer of 2020. From that experience, and from continuing to create in-person theatre with the residue of COVID-19 and the continued pandemics of violence, discrimination, and environmental crises in the U.S. and beyond, I began researching and enacting feminist care practices in rehearsals. I specifically dissect my processes of directing Charlotte’s Web, The Wolves, and American Girl(s).

Through this auto/ethnographic body mapping project I attempt to answer the following questions: How did I become a feminist director in the academy during COVID-19? How does the feminist director embody “care” in the current political moment? I reveal how enacting feminist care theory in academic rehearsals, specifically through the practices of casting understudies, body mapping, and modeling the artist↔citizen, creates socially aware artists who understand that all bodies are valuable, bodies carry various cultural scripts and traumas that inevitably enter the rehearsal room, and bodies creating at the theater are at all times implicated in the political world. The project concludes with a Sara Ahmed style “Feminist Killjoy Thriving Kit” for theatre makers invested in creating art that enacts a caring politic in a care-less world.