Valerie Lucas
Assistant Professor

Areas of Expertise
• Acting and Directing
• OSU Extension State Specialist: The Arts

Originally from California, Dr. Valerie Kaneko Lucas worked for many years in London as theatre scholar, director and designer. Her international career as a scholar and theatre director has encompassed England, Wales, Europe and the United States. Her previous posts have been at Bath Spa University, Essex University, Middlesex University, and Roehampton University.

As a theatre practitioner, she trained at the Sherman Theatre Cardiff, the Royal National Theatre, the Welsh National Opera, and worked in mask and devised theatres at Bonn’s Theatre Die Raben and Hijinx Theatre. Her creative research for both mainstream theatre and community-based arts groups includes site-specific performance, devised performance, translation, adaptation, and drama for development. Her design work has included projects for intercultural awareness, multi-cultural theatres, and work with refugees and at-risk youth. Her directorial work includes the foundation of Theatre Valise, a women’s theatre company and a commission by the British Council to create a five-year intercultural drama program: Shakespeare in Palestine; as a Guest Artist at OSU, she directed The Memory of Water (2002) and Comic Potential (2003). Valerie is a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Theatre Research (London) and Co-convener of the Scenography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

Her research focuses upon representations of race, ethnicity and gender in contemporary theatre and early modern drama, and in the relationship of scenographic practice to image, site, and memory. Her current research interests are in the areas of hybridity, contemporary British theatre, British Asian and Black British writers from the post-Empire Diaspora, and a comparative study of British Asian and Asian American theatres. She is a contributor to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance and to the forthcoming volume, Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and British Asian Theatre.

Dr. Lucas’s posts at OSU are Assistant Professor in Acting and Directing at the Department of Theatre, Director of Outreach and Engagement and OSU Extension State Specialist – The Arts. She is developing a program of arts-based partnerships between OSU Extension, the Department of Theatre and the College of the Arts, and contributes to diversity initiatives and in the continuing development of Asian-American Studies at OSU.

Education
• B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz
• Diploma in Theatre Studies - University of Wales Cardiff
• M.A. University of Essex
• Ph.D. University of Essex