Hadley Mays

Hadley Mays joined the Conservatory in 2024 as an assistant professor of theater. She is an actor, interdisciplinary performing artist, theater deviser, teacher, and workshop facilitator. Her praxis, training, and experience are rooted in a range of cultural traditions. She has performed nationally and internationally in both classical and experimental theater. As an interdisciplinary artist, she has performed and created work across many genres of dance and performance—including Butoh, classical theater, Afro-diasporic dance, object theater, performance installations, movement theater, ensemble collaborations, and ritual performance.

She holds an MFA in Theater: Contemporary Performance from Naropa University, a program which has developed a new paradigm in performance training based on somatic techniques, contemplative practice, world theater, and dance forms. While at Naropa, Hadley studied and performed with some of the original pioneers of postmodern dance and performance art. Since graduating, she has continued to work with leaders in contemporary theater and in independent, regional, and off-Broadway productions. At the core of Mays’s work is what she calls divinatory-somatics: practices where the body is the medium. She also has attended a graduate program in psychology and counseling, and acquired many years of experience and research in cultural studies, ritual, performance, and trance states.