Yuko Kurahashi

Dr. Yuko Kurahashi is a professor of theatre in the School of Theatre and Dance at Kent State University. Her areas of specialty include multicultural theatre, community-based theatre, and intercultural theatre. She is the author of Asian American Culture on Stage:
The History of the East West Players (Garland, 1999) Multicultural Theatre (Kendall/Hunt, 2004 & 2006), and The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong (McFarland, 2020). She writes performance reviews and articles for scholarly journals and other venues to support her fellow artists. She occasionally works as a dramaturg.

Dr. Kurahashi received the Outstanding Research Scholar Award in 2020 and the 2021-22 President’s Faculty Excellence Award.

An activist, Dr. Kurahashi led an anti-hatred rally on the KSU Kent Campus in April, 2021 with her friends and colleagues. This successful event inspired them to start a new employee group, the Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander Faculty and Staff
(AAAPIFASA). This evolved into the establishment of an Employee Resource Group, AAAPIFASA for which she served as an executive officer.

A book and history lover. Dr. Kurahashi and her NEA Big Read team received the 2021-2022 NEA Big Read Grant. As the co-project director, Yuko was instrumental in organizing events including the visits/lectures of Joy Harjo (Poet Laureate), Robin Wall
Kimmerer (Botanist), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Historian).

Dr. Kurahashi is reaching out to Indigenous artists to bring their voices to KSU. In Fall 2021 she received an Art Midwest GIG (Grow, Invest, Gather Fund) that enabled her to invite DeLanna Studi, an actor, artist, teacher, and storyteller to Kent State University.

A Union gal and an advocate for higher education, Dr. Kurahashi has been an executive member (the membership chair) of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors)-KSU. She increased the AAUP-KSU membership, which has recently reached the highest in its history. She served on the Board of Trustees of the Ohio Conference AAUP, 2019-2022. As a KSU delegate for the National AAUP, she lobbied at the US Capitol, where she twice met Senator Sherrod Brown.