Nichole Nicholson is a 25 year old scholar-artist-teacher currently residing in Carbondale, IL, while she works towards a Ph.D. in Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University. She believes that her scholarship, art practice, and teaching are mutually constitutive, and strives for all to be deeply embedded in relationship. Her work covers a variety of topics in a variety of media, because each media teaches her something different. Though she does not like to be defined by medium or topic, her work generally circulates around the areas of performance, new media, narrative identity theory, queer theory, generative/process based art, disability studies, and dance. She is commited to a practice that embraces creativity, experimentation, and radical love.

Nichole has performed in and worked on numerous shows in the the Marion Kleinau Theatre, and has taken both solo and collaborative projects to professional conferences and performance festivals. Her directing experiences include Crippling Language: Disabling the Body, a show exploring the social construction and discipling of disabled bodies, and Tending the Crocodile, her Master's thesis show using postmodern dance to rupture normalizing narratives of Adult Children of Alcoholics.  Her Master's Thesis won second place in the SIUC university-wide Outstanding Thesis competition. Recently, she was also part of the Generative Art show at SIUC, where she had several solo and collaborative projects displayed.

In August of 2011, Nichole joined Anna Charlotte, Nico Wood, and Sam Sloan at the Minnesota Fringe Fest for a five night run of Meat My Package, written and directed by Anna. The show is a spectalur romp through sex-positivity and queer feminism using dance, popular media, and personal narrative.  While working to build a portfolio of net art, Nichole also has several performance projects currently in the works. In the current Kleinau season, Nichole directed Little Orphan Annie Eyes, written and performanced by Joshua Potter about his experiences of cancer and his attempt to deconstruct the discourses which medicalize the body. She will also be the Technical Assistant for Sam Sloan's upcoming show, Try This @ Home: An Experiment in Remix Culture, a multi-media extravaganza that puts into practice a remix aesthetic through various methodologies.

In the Spring of 2012, Nichole will be performing at Southern States Communication Association and presenting a paper and a solo performance at International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry.

This year, Nichole was the recipient of the prestigious Thomas J. Pace, Jr. Aware for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching. Her teaching experience to date is predominantly in the setting of the Speech Communication 101 classroom, an environment she finds to be rich with possibility. She strives to maintain an other-focused pedagogy, meeting her students where they are and shaping her teaching to meet their needs while never lowering expectations. Accessibility and playful experimentation are two of her important core values, and her favourite teaching moments are when her classroom is alive with conversation, performance, and hands-on application of course material. She hopes to continue teaching far into the future, and looks forward to growing with new students every year. Nichole presented an original paper on creating accessible classrooms through collaboration and peer-to-peer learning at the National Communication Association conference in 2011 in New Orleans.

Incidentally, all of Nichole's favourite philosophers are French, and she has a deep love for cats.