Melanie Dreyer-Lude, EdD, MFA, MA, BA

Area of Study / Keywords

Theatre Practice International Collaboration Interdisciplinary Pedagogy Performance as Research

About

Melanie Dreyer-Lude is an American theatre artist/scholar, born and raised in Denver, Colorado. She specializes in international theater collaboration and multidisciplinary projects.  As a guest at the Performance as Research Festival in Ottersberg, Germany in 2012, she and her collaborators presented a multilingual performance intervention investigating place and space. In 2011, she directed and produced S/he in Ithaca, New York and Istanbul, Turkey, a bilingual production with Turkish theater artists exploring the female body as a battleground.  In 2007, she directed a bilingual production of Outside Inn, presented in collaboration with German theater artists from Theater Rampe Stuttgart, which played in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, New York City, and Stuttgart, Germany. Fluent in German, Dreyer-Lude translates and directs contemporary German plays, which have been produced in the United States and Canada and published in international magazines and anthologies. A Fulbright scholar, her current research focuses on refugee stories, and adapting and staging traditional folktales with the Ndere Center in Kampala, Uganda. She continues to enjoy an ongoing relationship with Cornell University, where she regularly gives workshops on research communication skills. She is a professor in the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta and lives and work in Edmonton, Alberta Canada.