D. Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson
Lecturer of Theater
Ph.D. University of Texas, Austin
forbes-erickson.com
d.amyrose.forbeserickson@rutgers.edu
Biography
Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson is a Caribbean American scholar, born and raised in Jamaica. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film, BGSU, and a part-time online lecturer in African American Theatre in the VMPA Department, Rutgers University – Camden. Her research has been published in areas about African and the African Diaspora (African, African American, Caribbean, and Latin American theatres and performances). A record of recent publications is featured in links below with studies intersecting in theatre practice-as-research, digital media, ethnographic musical and visual cultures, Afrofuturism, and Black technoculture. Her research focusses on performance historiographies on race, gender, coloniality/decoloniality, genocide, Black feminisms, sacred queer spaces in masquerades. Her book (in progress), Caribbean Masquerades as Palimpsests: A Chronological Survey from the 16th Century to the early 21stCentury (Edwin Mellen Press), traces the emergence of masquerade figures in carnivals, balls, and parades from the point of contact between European conquest, and Indigenous and African peoples in the Caribbean from the 16th century to the early 21stcentury.
Dr. Forbes-Erickson is the founder/artistic director of the Pan-African Theatre Ensemble (PATE) dedicated to Black theatres in the African continuum. Selected directed plays with the PATE include Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, Francisco Arriví’s Vejigantes, Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone, and a devised production, based on Mwatabu Okantah’s epic poem Cheikh Anta Diop: Poem for the Living called “Digital Masks to Africa” that traveled to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Edinburgh, Scotland in August 2019. Other directed productions include California State University, Sacramento’s production of We Are Proud to Present by Jackie Sibblies Drury in April 2021, Black Swamp Players’ 30th anniversary production of Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith, May 2022 in Bowling Green, Ohio, and Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks in October 2023 in the Department of Theatre and Film, Bowling Green State University.