Member Spotlight: Jake Hooker

JAKE HOOKER

Ann Arbor, Drama

Program Head, Residential College (LSA)

What is your area of specialty?

Contemporary Theatre and Performance Practice, Practice-as-Research, Theatre History, especially US Experimental Theatre and Global Avant-garde Performance Traditions, Performance Theory, Socially-engaged Theatre — history and practice

Ahostofpeople.org

What are you proud of as a lecturer?

I am proud of my students who are investigating what theatre means — or might come to mean — in this politically and socially fraught moment.

I am proud that RC Drama as a program has made a commitment to the intersection of aesthetic rigor, political activism, community engagement, and global awareness in our investigation of theatre and performance as an instrument of social change and people-centered empowerment.

What might others not know about you?

I write poems and still hope — someday, somehow — to get some published (which would require actually sending them to a publisher).

What is something that you are proud of outside your role as a lecturer?

I’m the Co-Founding Director of a Detroit-based theatre company called A Host of People, which makes original, ensemble created multimedia theatre for social change.

We have recently become the managers and resident company of a new community arts space slated to open in late 2026 or early 2027 on the west side of Detroit! (Shoutout to our amazing architect fellow LEO member Laura Peterson, who I first met during union membership drives!)