Eric Jorgensen

Dr. Eric Jorgensen is a theatre artist, scholar, and educator whose work explores the intersections of performance, memory, medicine, health, and identity. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Wyoming and a Clay Fellow in the Honors College.

 

Dr. Jorgensen’s scholarship focuses particularly on the theatrical and cultural histories of HIV/AIDS and on the ways performance allows us to encounter experiences of illness, loss, survival, and memory. His forthcoming book, Reacquired: I, Thou, and the American AIDS Play, is under contract with Intellect Books and the University of Chicago Press. The book considers American drama written about and in response to HIV/AIDS, asking what these plays and performances can teach us about encountering the experiences of others and preserving the embodied and cultural memory of an epidemic.

 

His writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, including both book and performance criticism. His chapter “Positive Status/Positive Space: The Opportunity of Disclosure” appears in Embodied Narratives in the Health Humanities and Literary Studies (University of Toronto Press). His forthcoming chapter “Haunted Stages: Absence, Horror, and A Chorus Line in the Age of AIDS,” examines the specter of AIDS within the history of the landmark American musical (University Press of Mississippi). He has presented at national conferences sponsored by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), the Health Humanities Consortium (HHC), and the American Literature Association (ALA). In 2026, Dr. Jorgensen was a delegate to AIDS 2026: the International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro.

 

Dr. Jorgensen is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association, with professional acting credits in regional theatre, national tours, and Off-Off-Broadway.  He spent nine years working for and traveling with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), including field assignments in South Sudan, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Jordan, and Georgia/Abkhazia. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Wyoming, he served as Deputy Director of Finance at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago.

 

As a Clay Fellow, Dr. Jorgensen will teach The Trouble with Normal: Performing Health, Illness, and Justice, an interdisciplinary course exploring how performance – on stage, on screen, in literature, and in life – shapes our understanding of health, illness, survival, and care. Grounded in the Health Humanities and drawing particularly on the ongoing legacies of HIV/AIDS, the course considers how illness narratives challenge cultural assumptions about normalcy, stigma, strength, and empathy, and how storytelling can function as an act of witness and resistance. Bridging humanistic scholarship with theatrical practice, the course ultimately asks how attending to – and performing – the experiences of others might help us imagine more compassionate and just futures.

 

He holds a BFA in Musical Theatre from Drake University, an MFA in Classical Acting from The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at the George Washington University, an MA in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an alum of the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center. Dr. Jorgensen is originally from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.