Meet the people behind the puppets!
Left to Right: Jason Yancey, Esther Fernández, Jonathan Wade, Alejandra Juno Rodríguez Villar, and Jared White. (2023)
Jason Yancey
Artistic Director
JASON YANCEY, is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Grand Valley State University, specializing in Theater and Early Modern Spain. His teaching regularly blends language, literature, culture, performance, and outreach. Since 2010 he has taught a puppetry course where advanced students in Spanish learn to read and analyze children’s literature while they write and produce original puppet shows in Spanish, culminating in several weeks of performances for local Spanish immersion elementary schools. He is a recipient of GVSU’s Pew Excellence in Teaching Award (2015), with nearly 20 years of experience building and performing with puppets for diverse audiences in the United States and Mexico.
Esther Fernández
ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ is an Associate Professor at Rice University. She is the author of Eros en escena: erotismo en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Juan de la Cuesta, 2009) and co-editor of Diálogos en las tablas: Últimas tendencias de la puesta en escena del teatro clásico español (Reichenberger, 2014) and El teatro clásico en su(s) cultura(s): De los Siglos de Oro al siglo XXI (Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2017). Dr. Fernández’s research interests have principally attended to eroticism and the Spanish comedia; visual and material culture; and performance analysis of classical theater’s most contemporary adaptations. Her most current research deals with animated props in ceremonial and theatrical contexts, where material representations of religious and ‘non-religious’ worlds took place in pre-modern Iberia and their contemporary legacies.
Jared White
JARED WHITE is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. His research interests consistently focus on Spanish theater, although he considers dramatic texts from multiple temporal periods--spanning the medieval era through contemporary forms. He performed as an actor in BYU's 2005 productions of El caballero de Olmedo and Las cortes de la muerte, as well as BYU's 2007 full-length play, El narciso en su opinión. Jared has years of experience teaching and sharing Spanish theater to diverse audiences, from elementary-age children to university students.
Jonathan Wade
JONATHAN WADE is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Meredith College where he teaches a variety of courses on language, literature, and culture. His scholarly work focuses on early modern Spanish and Portuguese literature, with particular emphasis on the comedia, Don Quixote and Cervantes, and Iberian Studies (1580-1640) . Since the early 2000s, when he participated in a series of Spanish Golden Age theater performance classes at Brigham Young University, theater has been a constant part of his learning and teaching. He is the author of Being Portuguese in Spanish: Re-imagining Early Modern Iberian Literature (1580-1640) (Purdue University Press, 2020).
ALEJANDRA JUNO RODRÍGUEZ VILLAR
ALEJANDRA JUNO RODRÍGUEZ VILLAR started playing theater in her native Galicia when she was seven. At the age of 12, she won her first acting award, and since then, she has not stopped stepping on all kinds of stages. Her theatrical career is very similar to that of the old traveling actors, from large theaters to improvised boards in small towns. Convinced of the immense value of the cultural legacy, her love for outreach and pedagogy made her focus on the classical repertoire. From Gil Vicente to the performance of autos sacramentales in churches, through Carlos Arniches' interludes in the open air on summer nights, her life in the theater has been marked by reviving the magnificent creations of Spanish theatre. Today, as an Associate Professor of Spanish at Hanover College, she transmits that same love to her students, who, under her direction, create tv-movies about great Spanish Golden Age texts.
Meet our creative and talented collaborators and friends!
Marta Albalá Pelegrín
MARTA ALBALÁ PELEGRÍN is an Associate Professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in the Department of English and Modern Languages. She coordinates Radio Comedia, a project of Diversifying the Classics that consist of a series of podcasts introducing classical Hispanic theatre in short episodes, with interviews. She holds a BA in Media and Communication from the University of Salamanca and studied Communication Scientifique at Paris VII. Marta trained at Salamanca's University Radio Station in her BA years and at Radio France International. It was in these years, between subway and subway stop, that she developed a taste for podcasts that she has now taken on to her commute in LA. Marta is the author of several articles and book chapters, has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA.
Robin Kello
Robin Alfriend Kello is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at UCLA, where he writes about Shakespeare, adaptation, the Spanish Golden Age, translation, migration, and the intersection of theater and social justice projects. His research and teaching intertwines theater, writing, and public outreach in service of a community-engaged and activist practice of. scholarship. way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
REBECA CASTELLANOS
REBECA CASTELLANOS earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from the University of Texas at Austin and is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Grand Valley State University. She is one of the founding members of the literary workshop El caballo verde, which existed in Miami in the 1990s. Rebeca has published the books Eva 2000 (Torre de papel, 2000) and Sueños de Nebuhla (Zona de Tolerancia, 2005). Her poems have appeared in various magazines, including Nagari (Miami), Contratiempo (Chicago), and Diálogo (DePaul University, Chicago). Her most recent book is a volume of poetry entitled Los instrumentos del gozo (Isla Negra Editores, 2016).
LAURA MUÑOZ
LAURA MUÑOZ is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. Her primary research interests include examining the theatrical production of early modern Valencian playwright Guillén de Castro, adaptations of the comedia on modern stages, and bilingual theater. As part of her work with the Diversifying the Classics initiative at UCLA, she has translated several comedias from Spanish to English and co-edited the collection 90 Monologues from Hispanic Classical Theater. She brings to Dragoncillo a love of theater and experience in creating curriculum for students of all ages.
SARAÍ JARAMILLO
BRENDA SARAÍ JARAMILLO is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature on the Literary Translation track from Brown University. She is a member of UCLA's Diversifying the Classics initiative and has participated in the translation into English of several Siglo de Oro comedias. Though her primary research interests include maternity and female embodiment in contemporary Latin American and Latinx literature, she delights in translation theory and practice.
CHECHÉ SILVEYRA
CHECHÉ SILVEYRA is a Ph.D. candidate with the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UCLA. His research centers around early modern theater, with an interest in dramatic texts produced in peninsular and colonial Spain, both in Spanish and Nahuatl. Cheché's works of short fiction have been published in different literary media, and he was an active member of the music scene in northern Mexico and southern US until 2009.
Pablo Mahave-Veglia
Cellist PABLO MAHAVE-VEGLIA resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is a professor at Grand Valley State University. Mr. Mahave-Veglia is a cellist and teacher of broad interests whose repertoire ranges from the early baroque, performed on period instruments, to his ongoing interest in researching, performing and recording the work of contemporary Latin-American composers. He counts among his musical influences his late mother, the noted piano pedagogue Mercedes Veglia, as well as such artists/teachers as Arnaldo Fuentes, Steven Doane, Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, Janos Starker and Uri Vardi.
Special thanks to our student partners,
Rocío González-Espresati (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Sriya Kakarla (Rice University).
(From left to right) Jonathan Wade, Esther Fernández, Jason Yancey, and Jared White. (2019)