Johann R. Montozzi-Wood
Assistant Professor of the Practice of Theater Studies

After graduating with a BFA in Musical Theatre, Johann (he/they) has performed over a decade in regional theaters, dance companies, amusement parks, and cruise lines around the world. They hold both an MA in Theatre Studies and an MFA in Physical Acting & Devised Performance. Johann’s most recent Actors’ Equity credit was performing the title role in the musical, Jelly’s Last Jam at Hatilloo Theatre and was awarded Memphis’ 2020 Ostrander’s Award for “Best Leading Actor in a Musical.” Johann is coming to Durham with his lovely husband, Bryan, and two cheeky felines from the University of Vermont where he was most recently an artist-in-residence directing and devising, what he calls, a “jazz queering” of the radio play version of It’s a Wonderful Life. 

Currently, Johann continues to develop their creative research practice through a devised project called Grandfathered In based on the migration of two great grandfathers from different sides of his estranged, bi-racial family. In this piece, Johann is constructing a “queer re(mix)ology” that transposes uncanny lineages of migration and posits “mixedness as a queer epistemology” always in tension with a Black imaginary and a colonial past. Being brought up in Mississippi, Johann is returning home to the South but more fully realized as a Black queer artist-scholar, a creative midwife for emergent artists, and a slightly witchy facilitator of embodied story-weaving through queer performance, worldbuilding, and folk songs.

Current Research Interests


laboratory theater | embodied manifestos | psychogeography

black performance studies | queer epistemologies | theatrical jazz aesthetics 

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Contact Information

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