Riley, Shannon Rose
Professor of Creative Arts & Humanities
Director of Dance
Coordinator, Creative Arts Program
Chair, Professional Standards Committee, Academic Senate
Preferred: shannonrose.riley@sjsu.edu
Telephone
Preferred: (408) 924-1365
Alternate: (408) 924-4481 (Creative Arts general number)
Office Hours
By appointment
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Davis, 2006
- Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Studio Art and Critical Theory, School of The Museum of Fine Arts & Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts, 1998
- Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Sculpture, with a minor in Art History, Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, 1995
Licenses and Certificates
- Registered Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist (RSME/T), International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), 2021
Bio
Shannon Rose Riley is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. She is a Professor in the Humanities Department, where she teaches courses in Humanities, Creative Arts, and American Studies. She is the Coordinator of the Creative Arts Program in the Humanities Department and the Director of Dance in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Dance. She is an elected member of the Academic Senate, serving as the Chair of the Professional Standards Committee.
Before coming to SJSU in 2008, Dr. Riley was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women's InterCultural Leadership at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, where she had joint appointment to the Department of Communication and Performance Studies and the Intercultural Studies Program (2006-08). From 1998 to 2002, she was the founding Dean of Students at Maine College of Art in Portland. Professor Riley has been an elected member of the Academic Senate at SJSU since 2011, serving primarily on the Professional Standards Committee, but also serving two terms as the Associate Vice Chair of the Academic Senate and Chair of the Committee on Committees. She served two terms as Chair of the Department of Humanities (2015-2019; 2019-2023) and was a Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project and SJSU in 2022-23.
Professor Riley has a PhD in Performance Studies and Critical Theory from the University of California, Davis (2006), an MFA in Studio Art (Performance, Video, Installation) from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1998). She completed a BFA in Sculpture and Art History from Maine College of Art (1995), and pursued broad undergraduate training in the arts and humanities at the University of Notre Dame, University of Colorado, Boulder, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, Dr. Riley completed training to become a Registered Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist (RSME/T) with the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA). She is currently involved in several community collaborations that explore the use of somatics in relation to healing and social justice.
Dr. Riley publishes widely and in several genres. She is co-editor, with Sondra Fraleigh, of Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages, on the Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance series with Routledge (2024). She is the author of Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti, & US Culture, 1898-1940 (Palgrave 2016), which examines the ways that Cuba and Haiti—both as signs and as sites—were crucial to the imaginative rethinking of race in the US at the turn of the 20th century. She is co-editor, with Lynette Hunter, of Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Palgrave, 2009, 2014). Riley's creative non-fiction essay, "Loving a Hornworm in End-Times: Connecting to the Small in Nature," was published in Catamaran Literary Reader (2020), and “The Ten Years War,” in Uprooting: Surviving Cycles of Domestic Abuse (2022/23). Her first piece as a Public Voices Fellow for the Op-Ed Project was published in The Hill Reporter (2022). Riley's scholarly essays appear in Theatre Topics, English Language Notes, Performing Arts Resources, and Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance as well as in the edited collections Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages (Routledge, forthcoming), Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Palgrave, 2013), Kathy Acker and Transnationalism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Palgrave, 2009, 2nd edition 2014). Her book reviews appear in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2013) and TDR: The Drama Review (2015). She is currently working on more short non-fiction and a longer piece of fiction related to her recent research in Cuba and Haiti.
Professor Riley’s visual and performance works have been exhibited/staged internationally at numerous venues, including the ICA (Portland ME), Mobius (Boston), Randolph Street Gallery and Artemisia Gallery (Chicago), the Cushwa-Leighton Library (Notre Dame IN), Mainz Germany (2001), Stanford (2013), the Festival Nacional de Pequeño Formato (Santa Clara Cuba, 2006), and Month of Performance Art-Berlin (2013).
Since 1980, Riley has been a core member of the Chicago-based gospel/noise/performance group, ONO. The ONO discography includes the albums, Albino (Moniker Records, 2012), Diegesis (Moniker Records, 2014), Spooks (Moniker Records, 2015), and Your Future is Metal (American Damage Records, 2018). ONO's latest album, Red Summer (American Dreams Records, 2020) was reviewed by Noah Berlatsky on grammy.com and was streamed on The Wire. ONO's next album, Sacrifice|Sacrificial, will be released by American Dreams Records on August 2, 2024. Riley and ONO-mates, travis and P.Michael Grego, also published a dialogue, “ONO Epistemologies: Resounding the ‘Bleeding Haints,’” in a special issue of Performance Matters: Sound Acts, Part 1. Vol. 6, Iss. 2 (Winter 2020). Their forthcoming album will be released early in 2025.