NIGEL SEMAJ. (they/them) is a Baltimore-based director, movement director, choreographer, and educator from Washington, D.C. Nigel is an Assistant Professor of Performance at UMBC focusing on movement, physical acting, and devising. Notable directing credits include the Off-Broadway Premiere of Bloodshot by Elinor T. Vanderburg, Ntozake Shange’s Spell No. 7 as well as new works such as Black Hollow, by Aeneas Sagar Hemphill and “wolfchildren runslowly through a Bruegel landscape,” 1558 by Reid Tang. Upcoming, they are directing Travis Tate’s Queen of The Night at Luna Stage (May 2024) and Calley Anderson’s Collective Empathy Formation From 1968 and 2018 at NYC’s Downtown Urban Arts Festival (June 2024). Their adaptation work includes a five-female adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus entitled 10,000 Moor, “For Hylas,” a queer retelling of the Hercules myth, and Call Me By Any Other Name…Just As Sweet: a queer deconstruction of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and an upcoming adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth titled the serpent under’t to premiere at UMBC in the Spring of 2026.  Nigel’s work as a Movement Director can be found within their own body of work, but recent credits include Movement Director/Fight Director of Heartbeat Opera Company’s adaptation of Beethoven’s Fidelio by Marcus Scott which became a NY Times Critic’s Pick and as Movement Director/Fight Director for the award-winning short horror film “Not Him,” written and directed by Sarah Young. Nigel’s academic tenure in higher education includes policy creation/amendment, creating protocols and policies around equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism. Their current scholarly work is developing anti-racist pedagogies in theatre education, including explorations of anarchist pedagogies and bell hooks’ pedagogy of freedom. They are a proud member of the American Alliance for Theatre Education. They will present sessions on Teaching Collaboration and Embodied Research at their 2024 Symposium and on Anti Racist Feedback and Critique Methods at their National Conference this summer.