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QUEST SKY ZEIDLER
Quest Sky Zeidler has long found himself fascinated with the art of storytelling. His childhood obsession with world mythology and high fantasy developed into a passion for theatre. An Angeleno born and raised, he grew up on Turner Classic Movies and the golden age of Broadway musicals. Enchanted by the redwood forests of California’s central coast, he completed his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, double majoring in Theatre Arts and in History of Art and Visual Culture. Immediately after earning his BA he continued his studies at UC Santa Cruz and received his MA in Theatre Arts. UC Santa Cruz provided him with ample opportunities for production experience as both performer and director: he toured abbreviated Shakespeare plays with Shakespeare-To-Go; directed his capstone thesis project, Lion in the Streets; and founded the performance troupe Loose Lips: A Lipsynch Cabaret.
Beyond UC Santa Cruz, Quest interned with foolsFURY in San Francisco and Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon on their new works festivals. In a similar vein, he served as a volunteer reader for Bay Area Playwrights Foundation and the Garry Marshall Theatre. During the pandemic he kept himself occupied as an independent researcher, penning essays on sexism in the Star Wars fandom and queer aesthetics in Naomi Iizuka’s play Polaroid Stories. As theatres reopened, he worked at Odyssey Theatre Ensemble alongside directors Bart DeLorenzo and John Farmanesh-Bocca. He also volunteered as a judge for the Fullerton College High School Theatre Festival and Drama Teachers Association of Southern California. In 2024 he relocated to Buffalo, NY to begin a PhD program in Theatre and Performance at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.
Quest’s primary research interests are queerness and monstrosity, frequent themes in his directorial pursuits. He finds himself compelled not only by what stories people tell, but how they are told. He seeks to explore how queer theatre-makers of the 20th century expressed their queer identities through the formal qualities of their work instead of its content. Other research of his touches upon the crossover between queer aesthetics and horror aesthetics, in contexts as disparate as Macbeth, mid-20th century gay liberation protests, and contemporary drag performance. Monsters have meaning, and to highlight this Quest and his lifelong friend and collaborator Annabelle Bonebrake started the podcast Ghosts Were People Too. Situated at the crossroads between serious academic study and lighthearted banter, Ghosts Were People Too deviates from the mass popularity of pseudoscience and parapsychology to instead interpret ghosts and hauntings as symbols and allegories in arts and culture.
AWARDS & ACADEMICS
2017 - Master of Arts in Theatre Arts,
University of California, Santa Cruz
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2016 - Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts and
History of Art & Visual Culture
University of California, Santa Cruz
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2016 - Art's Deans Award in History of Art & Visual Culture
2016 - Honors in History of Art & Visual Culture Senior Seminar