About

I am Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. I trained at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City, with additional training at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP). In my private practice, I offer psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to adults and young adults, and also offer clinical supervision.

I work with a wide range of issues—including anxiety, depression, trauma, body image, relationship difficulties, family dynamics, unhappiness at work, and creative blockages. I have particular expertise with trans, queer, and nonconforming genders and with queer sexualities, and have a long history of working with LGBTQ+ people both in my clinical practice and in my classrooms.

I have come to my clinical training and practice out of a long and ongoing career as an academic who specializes in queer and feminist theories, critical studies of religion and secularism, psychoanalysis and culture, and performance studies. I joined the faculty at New York University, in 2003, and my home base is in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts. But I am also an associate member of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and an affiliate member of the Department of Religious Studies. From 2008 to 2017, I directed NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

At NYU I work with both undergraduates and graduate students, offering lecture courses and seminars on a wide range of topics, from lecture classes on “Religion, Sexuality, and Affect in American Public Life” to thematic seminars on “Performance and Politics” and “Trauma and the Performance of Witness,” to classes focused around one particularly influential thinker (e.g., Foucault!) or field-constituting text (e.g., Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams). I love teaching and the buzz of learning in company. For me, the experience of learning also crucially involves un-learning and un-knowing, as we are challenged to examine what we thought we knew, including who and what we thought we knew as ourselves.

I maintain an active scholarly life, writing articles and books, giving lectures at universities as well as psychoanalytic institutes, and contributing actively to a number of interdisciplinary fields.