Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance

Mohamadreza Babaee, M.F.A., Ph.D., is an Iranian performance and digital arts studies scholar and transdisciplinary artist. He frequently presents at performance studies conferences and contributes articles and book reviews to academic journals, including Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Topics. In his current manuscript project, tentatively titled Modded Futures: Performance and Middle Eastern Identities, Dr. Babaee relies on critical race and ethnic studies, surveillance studies, transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and interventionist art frameworks to argue that Middle Eastern immigrants in US diaspora perform a series of cultural, civic, digital, environmental, and robotic strategies not only to resist the condition of their racial oppression but also to repurpose those discriminatory structures into empowering mediums, tools, and opportunities. Among a rich array of case studies, this manuscript includes an analysis of the Middle Eastern American Theatre Artists Bill of Rights, spatial reconfiguration in the multimedia installation Unpacked: Refugee Baggage by Mohamad Hafez and Ahmed Badr, border security at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, and the digital formation of Iranian identity through the public performances of the “Sneaky Freedom” feminist movement and lobbying practices against the passage of the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act. Dr. Babaee’s research has garnered national and international recognition at different venues, including winning ASTR’s David Keller Travel Grant, the ASTR/Selma Jeanne Cohen Conference Presentation Award, the BGSU Shanklin Award for Research Excellence, and the BGSU Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Essay Contest and the Bright Talents Fellowship at the University of Tehran.

Dr. Babaee is also an active artmaker. His creative practices range from lending dramaturgical skills to various professional and university theatre productions to creating video game art about issues of migration and surveillance. His most recent project, Global (re)Entry, is a critical and parodic take on the Global Entry program designed by the US Customs and Border Protection agency. Similar to other Trusted Traveler programs, Global Entry allows “low-risk” US citizens and permanent residents to use an automated machine to receive clearance for crossing international borders. The conditions through which Global Entry considers a traveler low risk are not disclosed publicly and are open to interpretation and bias. Global (re)Entry, designed as a 2D game, borrows textual and visual assets from websites associated with the US Department of Homeland Security to simulate and repurpose the traveler screening program. In the game, players must answer questions to receive travel clearance cards. However, their resistance to participating in state-sponsored security theatres can reward them in “cosmic” ways. While players can use the game to learn more about unfair border control strategies and oppressive state policies targeting immigrants, they can also fictionally redesign discriminatory US immigration forms and generate pro-immigrant, antiracist manifestos.

Publications

(Preparing for submission) “Securing Iranian Identity: Performance, Muslim Ban, and Covert Border Crossing,” TDR: The Drama Review, Cambridge University Press.

(Book review) Pahwa, Sonali. Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 187. Review for Theatre Topics, vol. 32, no 1, Spring 2022.

“Performing (In)visible Bodies in Unpacked: Refugee Baggage,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 34 no. 2, 2020, p. 53-70.

(Translation) Kantor, Tadeusz, Marek Świca, Jarosaw Suchan, et al. Tadeusz Kantor: Interior of Imagination, translated by Mohamadreza Babaee and Keyvan Sareshte. Tehran: Namayesh Publication, 2013.

Selected Peer-reviewed Presentations

(Forthcoming) “Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Utopia,” Disidentifying Borders Working Group, ASTR, New Orleans, LA. Nov. 2022.

“Choreography of Borders: Performing Middle Eastern Racial Mobility in Saba
Zavarei’s Looking for Tehran.” Transnational Performance Working Group, ASTR, Arlington, VA, Nov. 2019.

“Unpacked: Refugee Baggage: Performing Middle Eastern Cultural Memory.” Moving San Diego: Sites, Senses, and Bodies Working Group, ASTR Forum, San Diego, CA, Nov. 2018.

“Zar: Exorcizing the Demon of Black Slavery in 19th Century Iran.” Theatre History Symposium, MATC, Milwaukee, WI, Mar. 2018.