» Paul Bonin-Rodriguez is a playwright, performer, and scholar whose works have been produced internationally since 1992. As a Lecturer in the Performance as Public Practice Program at the University of Texas at Austin, he has developed courses that combine artist creative and business skill-building studies with an examination of the history and ideologies of artist funding and support in the United States. Currently he is at work on a book the theorizes the emergence of what he calls the “Artist-Producer,” an identity drawn from the confluence of new market economies and recent contemporary training initiatives, artist support organizations, and studies which presume that artists must acknowledge their own material roles, concerns, and capital investments to participate fully in their own sustainability. The “Artist-Producer” hyphenate is a key part of a an applied artist-training program he is creating for artists in the South Texas region through Jump-Start Performance Co. in San Antonio, a community-based theatre company of which he is the member. His plays have been published in Text and Performance Quarterly (TPQ, 2005), Jump-Start Playworks (Wings Press, 2004), and The Color of Theater (Continuum, 2002).

» Gordon Coonfield (Ph.D., Michigan Technological University) is Assistant Professor of Communication and director of Media Studies at Villanova University. The author wishes to thank Patty Sotirin for reading and responding to on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Michael LeVan and Craig Gingrich-Philbrook for their attentions, generosity, and patience. Correspondence to: gordon.coonfield@villanova.edu.

» Joy Crosby is a Ph.D. Candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

» Jill Dolan is Professor of English and Theatre and Dance at Princeton University. She is the author, most recently, of Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. She is also the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic, and other books and articles on feminist, lesbian, and queer theatre and performance studies. She has won distinguished teaching awards at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a former president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and of the Women and Theatre Program, and a former executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her blog is The Feminist Spectator.

» Craig Gingrich-Philbrook is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illilnois University, Carbondale, specializing in performance studies, particularly at the intersections of queer theory, performance art, autobiographical performance, DIY media, and psychoanalysis. As a performer, he has appeared at Dixon Place, SUSHI, and universities around the country. His essays and scripts have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Communication Theory, Theatre Annual, The Journal of Homosexuality, and a number of edited volumes. His most recent solo performance is "Still Life, with Cardinal," which begins touring later this month. Corespondence to: craiggp@siu.edu.

» Shauna M. MacDonald is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

» Benjamin D. Powell (PhD, Louisiana State University) is an instructor of performance studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. His primary research interests include the intersection of science and performance, the use of sound technologies in performance art, and process philosophy.

» Jaclyn Pryor is a community-oriented independent artist in Austin, Texas. [website]

» Tracy Stephenson Shaffer is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, where she directs in the HopKins Black Box and teaches courses in performance and film. Last year, she directed the original The Life and Times of King Kong, and her media project on the performance is featured in Liminalities 4:3. She has also published essays in Text and Performance Quarterly and Theatre Annual and is the author (with Ronald J. Pelias) of Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts (Second Edition, Kendall-Hunt, 2007).