School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-10 of 12 Results
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Leeth Singhage
Ida Fellow, Institute for Diversity in the Arts
Undergraduate, Management Science and Engineering
Student Wardrobe Supervisor, Theater and Performance Studies
Undergraduate, Theater and Performance StudiesBioLeeth Singhage is an actor, writer, and producer from Sri Lanka, pursuing dual degrees in Management Science & Engineering (B.S.) and Theater & Performance Studies (B.A.) at Stanford. His creative work often investigates pressing current events and explores themes of identity, resilience, and cross-cultural storytelling. His writing credits include QUARANteen (2021), a verbatim-theater production on the teen experience of the COVID19 lockdowns, GROWTHesque (2022-23), a meta exploration of Sri Lanka's political and economic crisis hosted at the Edinburgh Fringe and NYC's United Solo festivals and filmed by Kehelmala Studios, Lab-Grown Meat (2023) a solo play on the incipient alt-meat industry produced at Stanford, and Yakada Yaka (2026), a full-length play on suicide currently in development in Sri Lanka and in the U.S.
Beyond appearances in his original work produced under SarongHoodie, Leeth has played lead roles across theater and screen internationally for over 10-years. Select acting credits include: "Shaan Murthy" in British TV series The Good Karma Hospital - Season 4 (2022) by Tiger Aspects Productions, "Friedrich" in the Broadway touring production of The Sound of Music (2018) by Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Really Useful Group, "Kalana" in multiple award-winning Grease Yaka Returns (2019-20) by AnandaDrama, "Ariel" in The Workshop Players' Shakespeare in the Park production of The Tempest (2017) by AnandaDrama, and "Peter Pan" in Peter Pan the Musical (2016) by COLD Theatre 7.
Leeth has worked in development for Academy® Award-winning filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi at Little Monster Films, for the multiple Emmy® Award-winning team at Baboon Animation, and for Sri Lankan production company, Kehelmala. Through his cross-cultural storytelling company, SarongHoodie, he aims to increase international representation of underprivileged communities in film and television. -
Matthew Smith
Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies
BioMatthew Wilson Smith’s interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
