Theatre has a presence in our world, whether you’ve sat in a darkened room with a crowd and watched a performance or you haven’t. Movie musicals like Wicked and La La Land have gained critical acclaim and a foothold in popular culture. Hamilton was the hot topic of conversation when it first took the Broadway world by storm, and most people reading this have probably at least seen a community theatre production or attended their child’s school performance. If you’ve played im

My Power Was Never Hard to Pronounce—Just Hard to Contain Growing up in a predominantly white community in Wisconsin, I was one of only three Indian students in my entire high school. For four years, I faced racism, bigotry, adversity, and xenophobia—experiences that made me acutely aware of my differences. My name, Alabhya, meaning "one who is invincible," was constantly mispronounced or reduced to nicknames for convenience. Instead of making the effort to learn my name, tea

In 70 days, I will be walking down the Schrott Center for the Arts stage to receive my bachelor's degree. I have noticed that as the date gets closer, the frequency of people asking me what is next for me exponentially increases. While the possibilities of the future have been dancing around my mind, I find myself thinking a lot more about how I got here. How did I end up in the Midwest when my home is 4,150 miles away? How did I end up in the art department when I was confid

In popular media, people’s background context is often told explicitly to help us, the audience, understand characters quickly and get focused on the storytelling. Blockbuster movies tend to quickly attribute the highest influence to those characters who have an Ivy League education or surged to success within their careers in record-breaking time. Iron Man is a great example because he’s a super genius who went to MIT, and that equates to inherent goodness as a superhero. Wh