Sarah Berry Pierce (She/They) is a New York based theater director and scholar whose work primarily focuses on girlhood, queerness, fatness, disability, and the examination of performance and embodiment. Originally from Mississippi, Sarah Berry hopes to examine how theater and performance have developed societal perceptions of Southern women, fat people, and girls. She plans to critique and examine theatrical representations of women in the American South, fatphobia, disability injustice, and the construction of embodied gendered identities. She is a current Master's candidate in Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of The Arts where she is completing her thesis entitled "She's Not Like the Other Girls: Queering the Categories and Performances of Fat Girlhood." Sarah Berry is currently exploring the performance of fat girlhood and the intersections between disability studies, performance studies, girlhood studies, and fat studies. While completing her Master's she was awarded the Leigh George Odom Memorial Award for Distinguished M.A. Student and presented her paper entitled "Fearing Fat and Appearing Fat: Performances of Fatphobia, Embodied Fatness, and the Queer Possibilities of Bodily Excess" at the UCLA Department of Theater and the Center for Performance Studies Graduate Conference. 

 

Sarah Berry graduated from Vassar College in May of 2022 with Honors in Women’s Studies and Drama, where she directed her senior thesis Our Dear Dead Drug Lord by Alexis Scheer. During her time at Vassar, she received the June Ross Marks ’49 Travel Fund award to complete archival research in Paris for her thesis in Women’s Studies entitled “Not Another Cinderella Story: Re-Imagining the Princess Through Camp in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006).” Sarah Berry was selected to present her research at the 2022 National Collegiate Research Conference at Harvard University and received the Eloise Ellery Fellowship for Graduate Study from Vassar College. She hopes to use her experiences as a queer girl raised in the South to reorient the ways in which theater is made, engaged with, and archived. Their dream is to merge all their interests to create sparkly theater and scholarship that young them would have loved (and needed) to have seen.