James Slowiak is a professor of theatre at the University of Akron and coartistic director of the internationally acclaimed New World Performance Laboratory (NWPL). Slowiak received his MFA in directing from the University of California-Irvine and a BA in Anthropology, French, and Dramatic Arts from Macalester College. He has directed more than seventy theatre events and conducted workshops in performance ecology in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He is coauthor (with Jairo Cuesta) of Jerzy Grotowski (Routledge, 2007).