Javier Hurtado is a playwright, director, researcher, and educator. Javier’s dissertation project examines the relationship between, performance, queerness, kinship, state power, history, and place through adaptations of Mexican pageant plays about the nativity of Christ. More specifically, this project centers on the work of Teatro Alebrijes, a queer, Spanish language, Latinx theatre ensemble from San Jose, California. Teatro Alebrijes’ aesthetic revisions of the pastorela offer their audiences a reorientation away from a social order that reaffirms compulsory and heteronormative logic about gender, kin, and spirit. Instead, they offer new worlds and model new relationships onstage and in the community. This project speaks to theorizations of kinship in queer studies and notions of adaptation in performance studies by tracking Teatro Alebrijes’ decade-long multidisciplinary approach to theatrical adaptation and writing for ensembles. Javier’s work has been published by Theatre Research International, Journal of American Theatre and Drama, Ecumenica, and Lambda Literary. Javier has presented scholarships at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), The American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), The Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside, and the Circus Historical Society. As a Dissertation Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Javier is looking forward to being a part of a community of interdisciplinary scholars who might encourage each other to embrace capacious understandings of intellectual and artistic labor and share it with the Tufts community.