Visiting Faculty

Jack Isaac Pryor (they/them) is a writer, theater artist, and performance studies scholar specializing in experimental forms; queer, trans, and feminist theories; and the politics of time.

For more than 20 years, I have been collaboratively creating socially engaged theater, performance, and events with and for communities—primarily as a director and devised theater maker. This work pushes the limits of the physical body in performance, plays with the materiality of time and space, re-imagines the audience-event relationship, and expands our understanding of what is possible in live art and in our everyday lives.

As an educator, I specialize in contemporary performance; illness and disability; and queer, trans, and feminist theories and methods. My courses combine studio-based practice with the rigorous study of social history and critical theory—training students to be skilled theater and performance artists, efficacious activists, socially engaged writers, and astute semioticians of the worlds that they create in both print and embodied forms. I am currently Associate Professor of Theater at Penn State-Abington, where I held the 2023-2025 Career Development Professorship. Directing projects at Penn State included staged readings of Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play; Sophokles’s Antigone (trans. Anne Carson, with original libretto by Emily Bate and live music by Dorie Bryne); and Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood; as well as the immersive, outdoor spectacle, Exit, A Banquet Piece—a devised adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, co-created with my colleague, Marissa Nicosia. This production also inspired our essay on abolitionist pedagogy, “‘Emergent Strategy’: Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time (2023). I was recognized with the 2023-2024 Outstanding Teaching Award at Penn State-Abington in recognition of “excellent and effective teaching.” In the 2020-2021 academic year, I also served as a Regional Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at The University of Pennsylvania (Forum on “Choice”). In fall 2023, I co-taught the seminar, Performance, Literature, and the Archive, with my colleague Lindsay Reckson at Haverford College, where I also served as a guest artist. In fall 2025, I am a Visiting Lecturer at Skidmore College.