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Engage@EMU director Decky Alexander.

Decky Alexander

Host of "Washtenaw United"

Jessica ‘Decky’ Alexander is a professor of drama/theatre education at Eastern Michigan University and Director of Engage@EMU, an office whose mission is to cultivate community and university collaboration. Both as a performer and as a faculty member, Decky has used the mediums of theatre and performance to foster voice with underserved and underheard individuals and communities.

Alexander’s current creative and scholarly endeavors include the use of theatre for faculty development; community performance, and community-based learning. Through Engage@EMU, the Family Empowerment Program, a supportive services program in affordable housing, and the Prevention Theatre Collective, a high school theatre program, which creates theatre to assist in the prevention of substance abuse and use.

In 2018, Alexander launched Limelight, a theatre company dedicated to addressing social/cultural problems, through theatre inspired solutions. Recent projects include: Solo Acts: A Theatrical Compilation on Solo Aging; Homebound, a podcast on intergenerational dialogue between seniors and young people during COVID 19; ReGen An Intergenerational Storytelling Experience in partnership with Generations United and Vital: A Fugue on Aging, An Ethnographic Performance on vulnerable seniors and caregivers commissioned by the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. All projects are situated in and with Limelight, Alexander's theatre consulting company and collaborative.

Recent publications include: A Tale of Telling Some Truths to Power in Applied Theatre with Youth (Routledge 2021); Disrupting a Disruption or Live Everything, in Community Engagement 2.0? Dialogues on the Future of the Civic in the Disrupted University, and Addressing the Student Debt Crisis: Steps Universities Can Take for Academic Leaders (2019) and the forthcoming Applied Theatre & Youth compendium published by Routledge.

When David Fair retired as WEMU news director and local host of "Morning Edition," he named Decky the new host of the weekly news segment, "Washtenaw United."