School Notes: David Geffen School of Drama
July/August 2016

Dean appoints new faculty members

Dean James Bundy ’95MFA appointed two new faculty members, effective with the start of the 2016–17 academic year.

Riccardo Hernandez ’92MFA has been appointed assistant professor adjunct of design for a three-year term. His productions at Yale Rep include the world premieres of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks; The Evildoers and Marie Antoinette by David Adjmi; and Indecent by Paula Vogel (which has its New York premiere this season). He has designed internationally, as well as for virtually every major nonprofit theater in the United States, on Broadway, and for touring productions and opera. Riccardo’s frequent collaborators include such leading artists as Arin Arbus, Ron Daniels, Liz Diamond (faculty), Mark Lamos, Tina Landau, Arthur Nauzyciel, Diane Paulus, Dan Sullivan, János Szász, Rebecca Taichman ’01MFA, George C. Wolfe, and Robert Woodruff (faculty). His recent collaborators include Steven Soderbergh, Julie Taymor, Michael Greif, and Leonard Foglia. He is the winner of an AUDELCO Award, the Princess Grace Foundation Award, the Connecticut Critics Circle Award, and he has been nominated for the Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Jeff, Drama Desk, and Tony Awards.

Magda Romanska has been appointed visiting professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism for the 2016–17 academic year. Magda is a wide-ranging scholar and practitioner: she recently wrote a new study of Polish directors, The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor (2012); authored the play Opheliamachine (2013); and was sole editor of The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (2014), the most comprehensive anthology of its kind. Her two coedited anthologies, Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism and The Theory of Tadeusz Kantor, are forthcoming.  She served as the dramaturg for the Boston Lyric Opera, and is also developing her own multimedia opera, The Life and Times of Stephen Hawking. In addition, she is the cofounder and co–executive director of the Theatre Times website, which will include 45 global editors and connect an international community to facilitate transcontinental collaborative models. Magda’s current research project is tentatively titled The Bionic Body: Technology, Disability and Humanism.