Creative Activity, Scholarship, Research
ANNUAL LOAD: EVALUATION FROM DEPARTMENT CHAIR:
2025 -- 2026 35% in progress
2024 -- 2025 45% 4: very good
"Professor de Guzman consistently maintains a high standard in all the items she achieves in her research and creative profile, contributing to both academic and artistic communities. Her work is thoughtful and impactful, and she continues to grow as a scholar and practitioner."
2023 -- 2024 45% 4: very good
"Professor de Guzman directed a very successful production for FIU Theatre. It was the best musical theatre production I have seen on our stage. In addition, she was commissioned by the Bishop Arts Theatre Center in Dallas to write a play to be fully produced at the Center for their 2024 Season event."
Creative Activity
acting
My creative activity as an actor includes auditioning, small scale projects, as well as theatre productions.
acting sample files:
• Summer 2025. Production -- The Heart Sellers
by Lloyd Suh, presented by Amphibian Stage Productions. Peer reviewed.
• Fall 2025. Staged Reading -- City Reads: Resistance
presented by City Theatre Miami.
• Summer 2024. Staged Reading -- The Emperor's Suite
by Paul Wong, presented by Miami Dade Department of Cultural Affairs & South Florida Theatre League.
• Summer 2024. Staged Reading -- Mansfield Prep
by Gena Monte, presented by The Greenhouse
• 2023 - 2025. Auditions, for the professional actor, are submissions for peer acceptance in the creative area of performance. Callbacks are successful peer selection. Since relocating to FIU in 2023, I had 8 auditions between the South Florida, Atlanta, and Dallas--Fort Worth markets. I had 5 callback auditions. I had 2 final callbacks.
directing
At FIU, I am assigned to direct one of four full productions each academic year.
This is the cornerstone of my Creative Activity for the Department of Theatre.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
FIU Theatre Spring 2024
Rodgers + Hammerstein's
Cinderella
FIU Theatre Spring 2025
The 25th Annual Putnam
County Spelling Bee
FIU Theatre in progress
production/creative
PLAYWRIGHT
"Zero, Sum, Hero, Bum"
by Olivia de Guzman
directed by Becki McDonald
Bishop Arts Theatre Center, Dallas, Texas
Peer Reviewed.
I was commissioned by Bishop Arts Theatre Center to write a play for their 2024 season event, The Sum of Us: Banned Books Festival. Mine was a one of a small curation of plays inspired by the book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee, a New York Times Bestseller and long-listed for the National Book Award. For the play festival, audience talk backs were given by Heather McGhee, Dr. Gail Christopher (National Collaborative for Health Equity), Jerry Hawkins (Dallas Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation), and some of Dallas’s prominent community leaders.
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Commissioned in Summer 2023.
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Final draft into pre-production: Fall 2023.
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Public workshop reading: Fall 2023.
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Full production performances: Spring 2024.
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I participated in the production process as a playwright and remotely as a consultant.
interview with Heather McGhee about the book and the play festival
SOUND DESIGN
The Moors
by Jen Silverman
directed by Melvin Huffnagle
FIU Theatre, Fall 2025
• Designed and co--directed on--stage live foley,
the first use of foley in FIU Theatre history,
in addition to designing recorded sound
• Acquired and advised a student music coordinator
(BFA Musical Theatre) to create orchestrated tracks for music as scripted
• Served as singing coach for one of the actors
The Moors by Jen Silverman
INTIMACY COORDINATION
for the FIU Theatre productions of:
• The Moors by Jen Silverman
directed by Melvin Huffnagle, Fall 2025
• Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
Directed by Michael Yawney, Fall 2025
• Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage
Directed by Katrina Batchelor-Gomez, Spring 2025
• John Proctor is the Villian by Kimberly Bellflower
Directed by Michael Yawney, Fall 2024
• The House of Ramon Iglesia by Jose Rivera
Directed by Ivan Lopez *upcoming 2026
Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage
As the Intimacy Coordinator, I collaborate with director, stage management, and actors to design, choreograph, and maintain moments of dramatic intimacy with consent, professionalism, and artistic integrity. Hired by the department chair, I consulted with an IDC certified colleague and created a formal system of Intimacy Coordination for FIU Theatre, to refine and integrate with the department's previous intimacy guidelines. This system implements the industry standard role of intimacy coordinator into FIU productions as necessary.
FIU Faculty Service & Recognition Awards
This university--wide, annual awards ceremony is presented by FIU Human Resources. By request of HR and the Dean of CARTA, I adapted and directed an excerpt of Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella to serve as the finale performance for the ceremony in Spring 2025. It included live music and a cast of 17 actors.
I have been asked to return and direct the finale for the upcoming 2026 awards ceremony. I am currently in pre-production for this performance.
Scholarship, Research
Currently, my budding research agenda lies in musical theatre training systems and the intersection of musical theatre and red nosed clown. I find that musical theatre material presents a challenge of contradictions: truth and active pursuit are often lost as the student meets the precise demands of melody and rhythm. Clowning concepts and methods may bridge the gap between high--level execution and vulnerability, between the muscle memory of rehearsal and the unknowability of the present moment. How might we refine musical theatre training systems to account for the seemingly contradicting foundations of musical theatre performance?
• Conference Presentation: “Anything You Can Do: Exploring Gender in Golden Age Musical Theatre Performance"
Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), 2025
From a 2025 lens, Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I may appear fraught with Orientalism, classism, and a Eurocentric savior complex. Its glaring and exploitative nods to gender inequality seem almost the least of its worries. But with a deeper dive into the sources, the historical foundation below the fiction, and the musical's impact over 75 years, The King and I emerges as a complex, unflinching testament to the most deeply run roots of feminism. And by Buddha, is the music good. What can we learn about The King and I in order to shed its problematic top layers and connect to the masterpiece underneath?
• Conference Presentation: “Adjudicated Acting Exercises. Memory: The Musical”
Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), 2024
Musical theatre training relies on processes that promote technique, precision, structure, muscle memory, and the dexterity to execute material as rehearsed and directed. This exercise, adapted from clowning (Christopher Bayes), calls for the musical theatre actor to invite more improvisation, personalization, vulnerability, connection to audience, and freedom of expression to their process.
Outcomes:
1. Organically create text and music for the purpose of driving and serving storytelling,characterization, and/or imagery.
2. Demonstrate written technical and artistic sensitivity to language and style.
3. Integrate musical context and devices with given circumstances.
4. Synthesize improvisation, personalization, and devised process with other approaches to executing published material.
5. Identify the cues, nuances, and experiences within heightened theatrical work that communicate as truthful.
• Conference Presentation: “Stage, Steps, & Song: Introducing Musical Theatre to Your Class”
Co-presented with Prof. Pioneer Winter. Arts @ FIU Day, 2023
FIU Professors Olivia de Guzman and Pioneer Winter will co-facilitate a workshop for teachers interested in exploring musical theatre with their students. Using two well-known musicals, A Chorus Line and Gypsy, workshop participants will engage in body-voice exercises, improvisation, and learning some iconic choreography. Participants will learn some popular tap steps found in many musicals, including Shim Sham, Buffalo, Maxie Ford, and Irish, in addition to learning the vocals to "One" and "Let Me Entertain You." The goal of this workshop is to break down initial barriers to trying this in their own classrooms.