Veronica Santoyo
Associate Teaching Professor of Theatre
Veronica Santoyo has an MFA degree in ‘Theatre: Contemporary Performance’ from Naropa University and an MA degree in ‘Drama Therapy’ from New York University. Veronica began her career as a theatre artist in Mexico City, where she is originally from, and was a member of two important Mexican repertory theater companies: the Latin American classical theater company Teatro Sobre La Arena, 1992-2003; and K-Oz Producciones, 2004-2008, a contemporary performance company researching new works by upcoming artists as well as staging contemporary interpretations of classical theater pieces. Prior to coming to Ball State, Veronica was adjunct faculty in the undergraduate performance department at Naropa University, and was a teaching assistant to dancer and choreographer Barbara Dilley in her class ‘Improvisation/Composition’. Here, Veronica developed a series of exercises to use voice improvisation as a way of incorporating spontaneous sound and text with movement composition.
Additionally, Veronica discovered the power theatre has as an instrument for healing and social change and has combined her work as artist and teacher with a drama therapy practice. As a drama therapist she has worked in private practice and with various clinical and educational institutions, conducting workshops in drama therapy and educational theatre, and working with diverse populations and special needs groups. At the 1998 Moral Re-Armament International Conference, in Caux, Switzerland, she organized and conducted drama therapy workshops.
Currently, Veronica is working on two performance pieces: a one woman show around the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and, together with another performance artist, a devised theater piece that uses the text and themes of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and combines embodied compositions with the use of shadow puppets and multimedia content to explore themes of war and its aftermath, politics in a democratic state, and civilian power struggles.