Isaiah Matthew Wooden is a scholar-artist who researches and writes about contemporary drama, performance, and visual culture.

Wooden is the author of Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture (Northwestern UP, 2025), which critically examines works by contemporary Black artists in multiple media—drama, film, performance art, and photography—that prompt reflections on and reckonings with the interplay of Blackness and time. He is also the co-editor of August Wilson in Context (Cambridge UP, 2025), Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP, 2020), and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of Theatre History Studies (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2024). Additionally, he edited a student edition of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Wooden’s articles and essays on contemporary art, drama, and performance have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications, including The Black Scholar, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Theater, Theatre Annual, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, The Huffington Post, and PopMatters, among others. His research has received such fellowships and honors as the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the American Society for Theatre Research’s Errol Hill Award, the Black Theatre Network’s S. Randolph Edmonds Award, and Honorable Mention for the American Theatre and Drama Society’s Vera Mowry Roberts Research and Publication Award.

As a director and dramaturg, Wooden has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center, including works by Lee Breuer, Kia Corthron, Eisa Davis, Lorraine Hansberry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Charles L. Mee, Lynn Nottage, Robert O’Hara, Natsu Onoda Power, Nilaja Sun, Lisa B. Thompson, and Mary Zimmerman. He has served on the Governing Council for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education; Executive Boards for the American Theatre and Drama Society, the August Wilson Society, and the Black Theater Association; the Editorial Boards for Imagined Theatres, PAJ, and Theatre Topics; and as the Performance Review Editor of Theatre Journal.

Wooden earned his AB in Government from Georgetown University and his PhD in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. He enjoys teaching a range of courses in the history, theory, and practice of theater at Swarthmore.