My name is Jo Michael Rezes (/rez/•/iz/, Hungarian pronunciation: rɛzɛʃ), a queer performance studies scholar and public humanities writer of food culture, chronic illness, and the sensory aesthetics of humor. My teaching on contemporary performance was given the Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education Award by the Tufts University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in 2021. There, I instructed ten (10) sections of Introduction to Acting and Public Speaking combined. Also at Tufts, I designed original courses Creativity in Crisis and Camp and Popular Media (first as a Robyn Gittleman Teaching Fellow and then twice more as a Visiting Lecturer for the Experimental College). I have also taught seven (7) sections of Introduction to Theatre at Boston College and currently teach Gender Inclusive Pedagogy, Devised Theatre, and Disability Justice for Theatre Education as an Affiliated Faculty member in Emerson College's Applied Theatre & Theatre Education graduate programs—where I have chaired three (3) thesis projects.

As a Dissertation Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, I completed my dissertation project, now monograph-in-process, Tastes Like AIDS: Sweet Aesthetics, Bitter Humor, and Viral Performances of HIV/AIDS, which centers taste—both literal and metaphorical—as it structures cultural understandings of HIV/AIDS across performance, media, and food cultures. Drawing from queer studies, performance studies, affect and sensory studies, food studies, and disability studies, the project argues that HIV/AIDS has been repeatedly imagined through sensory metaphors of flavor, particularly sweetness and bitterness, which shape racialized and queerphobic discourses about contagion, intimacy, and the body. Rather than only treating taste as a descriptor of aesthetic discernment, this dissertation positions taste as an embodied method which organizes public encounters with HIV/AIDS across archival ephemera—from social media to film and television, theatre, installation art, ‘zines, legal records, and culinary practices. I have published this writing in Queers at the Table and the cover chapter of Sicks Jokes: Visual Histories of Health, Humour & the Body. From this research, I am developing a play, a literary nonfiction trade book on AIDS discrimination in food service, and a cookbook.