Our Research Team

Meet the members of our creative and research team. 


Dr. Carmen Meyers

Carmen Meyers

Ed.D in Educational Theatre, playwright, and director

Carmen Meyers is an actor and educator committed to developing applied theatre practice as a basis for community empowerment. She has over 18 years of teaching experience at the college level. She currently teaches at Bronx Community College, CUNY in the Communication Arts and Sciences Department as a tenured lecturer. Her most recent work was in co-writing Your First Love Usually Surfaces: An exploration of art and economics, an ethnodrama that explored the challenges and triumphs of sustaining artistry in our current climate. She holds a MFA in acting from Indiana University and a BFA in Theatre from Arizona State University. Recent New York credits: Verbatim Performance Lab: Mon Avital (Avital Ronell), NY Shakespeare Exchange: King John (Queen Eleanor), and Romeo and Juliet, Springs Awakening: Two Plays Two Conversations (Mrs. Gabor); NYU Devising Ensemble, Hear Them Roar: The Fight for Women’s Rights. Carmen’s regional credits include: Playhouse on the Square, The Graduate (Mrs. Robinson, *Ostrander Nominated), and Summer Music Theatre Festival, Mame (Mame). She is currently a candidate in the new Ed.D. Educational Theatre Program at The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Development, New York University. Carmen is a proud member of the Actors Equity Association and lives in Harlem, NY.


Joe Salvatore

Clinical Associate Professor of Educational Theatre at NYU-Steinhardt and director of the Verbatim Performance Lab, and mentor of this project. Professor Salvatore teaches courses in verbatim performance, ethnodrama, and community-engaged theatre. His most recent project Making Gay History: Before Stonewall, a verbatim documentary theatre adaptation of Eric Marcus’s Making Gay History books and podcast series, premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse in February 2020 and is now available for licensing. Recent VPL projects include You Can’t Unring the BellGuess the CandidateThe Democratic Field (with Artists’ Literacies Institute), The Serena Williams Project, and The Kavanaugh Files. In 2017, Joe collaborated with economist Maria Guadalupe (INSEAD-France), to create Her Opponent, a verbatim re-staging of excerpts of the 2016 presidential debates with gender-reversed casting (nominee: Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Unique Theatrical Experience). He has presented about his verbatim performance practice at SXSW EDU, MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Sloan School of Management, Yale SOM’s Education Leadership Conference, University of Massachusetts, and at Trinity College and Tallaght Community Arts in Dublin, Ireland.


Verbatim Performance Lab

Verbatim Performance Lab

The Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL) emerged following the success of Her Opponent, a re-staging of excerpts from the 2016 U. S. Presidential debates with gender-reversed casting, created by Maria Guadalupe (INSEAD) and Joe Salvatore (NYU Steinhardt). That performance premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse in January 2017 and then went on to enjoy an Off Broadway run at The Jerry Orbach Theater. A full archival video of the performance is available here.

The ability of Her Opponent to stimulate conversation amongst its audience members inspired the creation of VPL. We use verbatim performance and documentary theatre techniques to examine what we think we know and understand about preconceived notions and biases but through a new and different lens and under a more penetrating light.

VPL produces content that challenges accepted political, cultural, and social narratives, while embracing the philosophy that social change emerges from dialogue, not monologue. We hope that educators and activists will find this content useful in their teaching and organizing.