Zachary Price

Zachary Price is a performer, writer, interdisciplinary theorist, and scholar who investigates the political, economic, and historical conditions that shape cultural production. His first monograph, Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (The Ohio State University Press), explores Black and Asian cultural production through martial arts across film, media, music, theater, dance, and everyday practice. His writing has also appeared in Theatre Topics, The Drama Review, The National Review of Black Politics, Journal of Asian American Studies, The Postcolonialist, and in the edited volumes Sports Plays and Classics In and Out of the Academy: Classical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century.

As a theater artist, Price has written and produced staged readings, solo performances, fully produced plays, and curated discussions in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. He most recently appeared in What Beautiful Space Tomorrow as part of William Kentridge’s In Praise of Shadows exhibition at the Broad Museum. His practice-as-research collective platform, Black Arts and Black Publics, explores intersections of art and activism. At UC Irvine, he produced a week-long residency with artist-activist Funmilola Fagbamila in 2021, which culminated in a public performance of The Intersection: Woke Black Folk at the Little Theatre.

Currently, Price is developing “critical race theater,” a series of dramatic literary works that draw from his research, including a stage adaptation of Black Dragon examining martial arts and the Black liberation movement. He is also conducting a research project on the director and dramaturg Lloyd Richards and collaborating with scholars to advance the emerging field of Afro Asian Cultural Studies.

At UC Irvine, Price is a member of the doctoral faculty in the Department of Drama at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and a core faculty member in the Department of African American Studies, teaching cross-listed courses across the arts and humanities. He holds a Ph.D. in Theater Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an M.F.A. in Drama from The New School University, and a B.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.

More about his work can be found at zacharyfprice.com