John Emigh

John Emigh (born 3 September 1941) is Professor Emeritus from the Departments of Theatre, Speech and Dance and of English at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Emigh taught at Brown from 1967 to 2009. Since his retirement, he has mainly been teaching and directing in the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA program.

John Emigh was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Connecticut. In his New Britain high school, he was a saxophonist in the school band, treasurer of numerous clubs, and planned on going to law school with the goal of going into politics.

He entered Amherst College, became interested in theater arts, and took a year off to travel to Spain and Morocco to study and translate plays by Federico García Lorca. He received his BA from Amherst in English and Dramatic Arts in 1964 and went on to graduate school at Tulane University in New Orleans. Tulane awarded him an MFA in Theatre (Directing) in 1967, and a PhD (Theatre: Theory and Criticism) in 1971.

Emigh is a director, performer, and acting teacher who has directed more than 70 plays in universities and in professional theatre, and has written extensively on the masked theatre and rituals of New Guinea, Bali, and India, as well as on Western theatrical practices. In 1974–75, he traveled in New Guinea, South Asia, and Indonesia, where he studied Balinese "topeng" masked dance with I Nyoman Kakul. Since then, he has made several more research trips to Asia, investigating the street jesters and court fools of Rajasthan, the use of masks in Eastern India, and the changing dynamics of performance in Bali.

His 1985 documentary film, Hajari Bhand of Rajasthan: Jester without a Court, has been shown at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Emigh also recently completed an interactive database of the permanent collection of masks at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi. His book Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre combines years of ethnographic research with the insights of a practicing actor and director to describe and theorize the use of masks in both Asian and Western contexts.

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