Brandi Wilkins Catanese
Associate Professor, African American Studies and Theater, Dance and Performance Studies
Associate Dean of the Graduate Division
Professor Catanese is a distinguished scholar of African American Studies and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies whose research focuses on race, performance, and representation. Her book Racial Transgressions: Colorblindness, Multiculturalism, and Black Performance reconceptualizes the cultural and political meanings of race in contemporary performance and media, and her editorial leadership as Editor of Theatre Survey helped expand the field's engagement with underrepresented histories and voices. Through this and other work, she has advanced new frameworks for understanding how performance shapes conversations about race, identity, and social change.
Catanese is also an exceptional teacher and mentor. In courses on African American life and culture and seminars on Black performance and theater history, she guides students in critically examining racialized representation as sites of critique, experimentation, and joy in contemporary culture while simultaneously cultivating imaginative approaches to social transformation. As faculty coordinator of Berkeley's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program since 2009, she has helped design and steward one of the campus's most impactful mentoring pathways for underrepresented students pursuing doctoral study, integrating rigorous academic training with a deep pedagogy of care.
Since 2020, she has served as Associate Dean in the Graduate Division, overseeing roughly $100 million in annual graduate student funding, leading the restructuring of university fellowships including the Chancellor's Fellowship with a focus on equity and accessibility, and centering the needs of vulnerable students in every policy decision. Catanese has also served as Faculty Equity Advisor for over a decade across both her home departments, creating initiatives such as the TDPS Sounding Board and contributing to faculty searches, graduate admissions, and climate efforts. Across all of this work, she demonstrates deep integrity, calm and deliberative leadership, and a rare ability to navigate contentious moments with compassion, clarity and collective care.
Eric Stanley
Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity
Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies
Professor Stanley is a leading scholar in trans studies, a courageous public intellectual, and the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. Their award-winning monograph, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable, examines endemic anti-trans/queer violence while uplifting creative resistance through organizing, art, abolitionist practice, and collective care. They are also co-editor of several influential volumes, including Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, each of which has shaped both academic and public understanding. Their work integrates trans studies, gender, sexuality, race, class, and abolition. They are also a creative filmmaker whose widely-circulated films bridge university and community knowledge and engagement.
Stanley is an outstanding teacher and beloved mentor. Their course on sexual politics and queer organizing earned the American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award. They created Berkeley's first Trans Studies class, co-developed a "big ideas" course on prison abolition, and helped usher in the newly reimagined Queer and Trans Praxis Minor. Their mentorship reaches students across varied disciplines—many from the most vulnerable communities on campus—and they have been deeply involved in sustaining the UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program as a reviewer, mentor, and advocate.
Stanley chairs the LGBT Citizenship Cluster at the Othering and Belonging Institute, advises the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, and serves on the Division of Equity and Inclusion's LGBT Special Task Force. They are a frequent voice in national media on trans rights and queer politics, and a dedicated scholar-activist working toward justice for vulnerable communities on campus and beyond.