Courtney Elkin Mohler joined the faculty of Boston College as an Associate Professor of Theatre in Fall 2022. Prior to this appointment, she taught and served as Associate Professor of Theatre and Associate Dean for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in Jordan College of the Arts at Butler University and was Assistant Professor of Theatre at Santa Clara University. Mohler holds a Ph.D. in Critical Studies in Theater from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also earned her B.A. in Theater with emphases in Acting and Critical Studies.
Due to her life long obsession for making theater, she has acted in, directed and served as a dramaturg for over forty productions on the professional and collegiate stage. As a stage director and dramaturg, Mohler concentrates on new works that push aesthetic and political boundaries aimed to affect a more equitable world and is dedicated to supporting new work by Native American playwrights. Some recent directing credits include The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe at Butler’s Lilly Studio Theatre, the pre-premiere of Larissa Fast Horse’s What Would Crazy Horse Do? at Santa Clara University’s Fess Parker Theatre, Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter (California State University, Dominguez Hills), and The Last Judgment and Laundry and Lies (Alliance Repertory Company).
Bridging her research and artistic interests, she also regularly directs and dramaturgs for the professional Native American theatre company Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles and serves on their National Play Reading Panel. Some recent dramaturgy credits include Lying with Badgers by Jason Grasl (Blackfeet) at Native Voices at theAutry (NVA), and Desert Stories for Lost Girls by Lily Rushing in a co-production with NVA and Latino Theater Company, The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa Fast Horse (Virginia Stage Company) and Yu-Che-Wah-Kehn (Bitter) by Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora), recipient of the National New Play Network’s Smith Prize for Political Theatre.
Mohler has contributed chapters to Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Women Playwrights into The Twenty-First Century (2021), American Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions (UCLA 2009), Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative (Routledge 2019), Transforming Our Practices: Indigenous Art, Pedagogies and Philosophies (NAEA Press 2017) and wrote the essay on American Indian Theatre and Performance in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Indian Issues Today (Greenwood 2013). She has published articles and reviews in the peer-reviewed journals American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, Ecumenica, Platform, Theatre Research International, Latin American Theatre Review and Text and Presentation. She co-authored Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre: Indigenous Spaces with Jaye T. Darby and Christy Stanlake (2020 Bloomsbury-Methuen Press), for which she received the Butler University Outstanding Professor of the Year award for Research in 2019. When she’s not teaching, writing or in the theatre, she is running after her highly theatrical daughters, Violet and Alice.
