Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance

Professor Goodlander’s main area of research, creative work, and teaching centers on tensions between tradition and modernity as expressed in transnational performance, literature, and other arts—primarily in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, especially in relation to gender, sexuality, and cultural identity. Her methods focus on the productive boundary between text, embodiment, material culture, and visual representation as investigated through an ethnographic lens.

In New York City and regionally Jennifer works as a director and teacher with a special emphasis on new plays and physically based performance. She often combines techniques such as Viewpoints with feminist theatre praxis to create dynamic theatrical worlds that bridge the divide of realism/nonrealism. She draws from her extensive training and performance experience in traditional Asian theatre to direct innovative productions of The Ghost Sonata, The Bacchae, and others. She was a member of the 2005 Lincoln Center Director’s Lab that focused on new play development and working in collaboration. She often shares her research through performances and lectures at theatres, civic groups, and universities and has performed wayang kulit (Balinese shadow puppetry) both nationally and internationally.  

Jennifer has received many grants and fellowships for her performance work and research on Asian performance, including a Fulbright Fellowship to Indonesia, a summer residency at the National Humanities Center, and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her first two books -- Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identity in Southeast Asia(2018) focus on puppetry – one of the oldest and most dynamic performances in Southeast Asia.

Her recent book project, Trespassing: The Subversive Travel of Indonesian Women in Literature and Performance seeks to understand how Indonesian women authors and artists rebel against boundaries of home and nation to declare agency within their creative work and lives. She rethinks how the popular literary genre of travel writing provides Indonesian women with a unique form of freedom—an opportunity to trespass beyond the boundaries imposed by the state and society, defying prescribed roles and expectations. In doing so, she introduces “trespassing” as a concept to theorize travel of nonbelonging, across borders, and into forbidden spaces. Her readings of literature, performance, and film are informed by ethnography and the embodied experiences of dance, puppetry, and travel. Currently, her work continues to explore intercultural dynamics through performance and text.

At IU, Jennifer teaches courses on global theatre, puppetry, feminist/queer performance, and directing at the undergraduate and graduate level. She works with graduate students in theatre practice (MFA) and graduate students in Comparative Literature, Folklore, and others.

Recent Publications and Other Activities:

• Director. Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors by Gordon Greenburg and Steve Rosen. Brown County Playhouse, Nashville, IN, 2025.

• Summer Residency. National Humanities Center (2025): Funded residency to work on my book project Trespassing: The Subversive Travel of Indonesian Women in Performance and Literature.

• Journal "Travel, Mirrors, and Red Shoes Across the Modern Global Archipelago: Gentayangan by Intan Paramaditha." Comparative Literature Studies 62.1 (2025): 48-75.
• Journal Article. “Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 2(2022) - Special Issue: Asian American Dramaturgies. 1-9.