"Whether through my creative work, teaching, or scholarship, I approach theater in relationship to the world in which it is created."
- Ginny Anderson
Dr. Virginia (Ginny) Anderson is Associate Professor of Theater at Connecticut College. She has taught courses in a variety of aspects of dramaturgy and theatre history including performing difference in the American Musical, classical theatre history, modern and contemporary drama, women in theatre, African American theatre history, LGBTQ theatre history, Theatre for Young Audiences, theatre in the United States, and theatre and film of the AIDS epidemic. In the fall of 2021 she will introduce a first-year seminar, Performing Public Health.
Representing her work as a scholar-artist, Anderson's directing credits include Cat Refugees for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project, Let Me Down Easy, Fun Home, The Cradle Will Rock, Detroit, On the Town, A Streetcar Named Desire, Falsettos, Boy Gets Girl, Marisol, Cabaret, The Last Five Years, Passion, James and the Giant Peach, Spring Awakening, and others. Her interest in musical theatre history was enhanced by work as a production assistant for the Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. There she also served as visual dramaturg and production assistant for Tennessee Williams Explored.
Anderson has conducted decades of research concerning HIV/AIDS and theatre, work that has focused on Broadway but has also taken her to England, China, and Cuba. Her dedication to advocacy and the arts has been recognized by the National Center for HIV, STD, & TB Prevention, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) as well as AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts.
Anderson has contributed to numerous journals and collections, including Theatre Journal, Theatre History Studies, The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century, and Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power. Her essay “Performing Interventions: The Politics and Theatre of China’s AIDS Crisis in the Early Twenty-First Century” appears in the recent Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave 2018) and her essay "'Something Bad [Was] Happening': Falsettos as Historical Record of the AIDS Epidemic" can be found in issue 13.3 of Studies in Musical Theatre (2019). Her essay "Story Pirates Radio as a Document of America, 2020" appears in the 2021 volume of Theatre Annual.
She has served in numerous capacities for the American Society for Theatre Research, the American Theatre and Drama Society, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Profiles:
Connecticut College: Professors honored with College’s highest faculty awards
Academic year opens with 105th Convocation
Connecticut College students told to stick their necks out
BWW Interview: Ginny Anderson's CRADLE WILL ROCK at Connecticut College
HerCampus.com - Campus Celebrity: Professor Ginny Anderson
HerCampus.com - Connecticut College Commemorates World AIDS Day
"Extraordinary Animal Acts," CC: Connecticut College Magazine
12 Courses We Wish We Could Take At Connecticut College This Semester
Tufts University: The Play's The Thing
Doctoral students have interests as wide as the world
.jpg)