Nicole Hodges Persley

Nicole Hodges Persley, Ph.D. is a nationally recognized scholar, creative leader, and architect of community-engaged innovation whose work redefines how higher education, the arts, and public impact intersect. She currently serves as Vice Provost for Community Impact at the University of Kansas, where she leads institution-wide strategies that align research, creative practice, and civic partnership to generate measurable social and cultural impact. 

An award-winning, tenured professor, Dr. Hodges Persley holds faculty appointments in American Studies and African & African-American Studies, with affiliations in Theatre & Dance and Film & Media Studies. Her interdisciplinary teaching and mentorship span performance, Hip-Hop studies, Black expressive culture, global majority performance, and transnational cultural studies, equipping students to move fluidly across scholarship, creative industries, and public leadership. 

A prolific director and creative producer, she has led more than 30 stage productions and multiple short films, modeling how artistic practice functions as rigorous research and community engagement. Her books, including Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip-Hop Theater and Performance (University of Michigan Press), Hip-Hop in Musical Theater (Methuen/Bloomsbury), and Breaking It Down: Audition Techniques for Actors of the Global Majority (Bloomsbury), along with several edited volumes, have helped reshape contemporary conversations at the intersections of performance, race, and culture. 

A field builder as well as a scholar, Dr. Hodges Persley is co-founder of CreateEnsemble.com, a pioneering digital platform supporting artists of the global majority, and founder of the Black Performance Project Archive at KU.