Johann R. Montozzi-Wood, MA/MFA

Formerly Johann Robert Wood

director-devisor | multimedia artist | professor

Johann (all pronouns) is an assistant professor of the practice of theater studies at Duke University. He holds a  Master in Arts in Theatre Studies from the University of Central Florida and Master of Fine Arts in European Devised Performance from Columbia College, Chicago in conjunction with arthaus.berlin International School. His creative and research interests explore critical intersections of race and sexuality through devised performance practice, embodied research, and postmodern aesthetics in theatre, music, and dance. 

As an actor, Johann was awarded Memphis’s 2020 Ostrander’s Award for Best Lead in a Musical for his work on the title role in Jelly’s Last Jam at Hattiloo Theatre. Johann is a member of Actor’s Equity.

As an artist-scholar, Johann has recently completed an artist-in-residency and lectureship at the University of Vermont, Berlin where he directed a devised version of Joe Landry’s radio play - It’s a Wonderful Life. He has contributed to a Bloomsbury publication writing a chapter entitled: “Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi: Visibility, Trans-position, and Devised Performance Practice” in Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation (2021). He is currently awaiting the publication of a Cambridge anthology chapter in which he explores the possibility of Black flâneurie and Baldwinian “strangeness” in Drifting Through Wonderland: The City as Performance.

Currently, Johann is conducting research for a devised project called Grandfathered In inspired by the migration of two great grandfathers from different sides of his bi-racial family. In this piece, Johann is wrestling with the relationship of servitude, slavery, and racism as queer lineages of migration and mixedness as a queer epistemology.

MFA Thesis: Queer Makishi - A Devised Performance Film

M.A. Thesis: Towards a Postdramatic Jazz Aesthetic: Per(form)ance and Its Discontents