Sloan Elle Garner

Sloan Elle Garner (she/her) is a production dramaturg and director with experience in devising, musical theatre, and adaptation. Sloan’s dramaturgical practice relies on offering tangible and relational experiences to casts, crews, and audiences to deepen relationships to text and narrative. She is the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Southeast Regional Vice President and an alumnae of Alpha Psi Omega.

She graduated from Mississippi School of the Arts with discipline focuses in theatre and music before earning her BA in Theatre from The University of Southern Mississippi, where she minored in Applied Music - Bassoon and graduated from the Honors College summa cum laude as a Presidential Scholar. She then obtained her MA in Theatre with a focus in dramaturgy from Villanova University, where she was a Thomas and Tracey Gravina Endowed Scholar. Sloan is currently the Instructor of Record for THEA4700: Dramaturgy. Previously, she has been Program Coordinator of the Theatre and Dance Departments at Eastern University, Dramaturg in Residence at Evergreen Theatre Collective, and Theatre Instructor at Grenada High School.

Sloan’s research specialties are in survivors' art and the intersection of ethnomusicology and dramaturgy, with projects ranging from operas of the Shoah to pinpeat orchestras after the Khmer Rouge genocides to the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Recent projects include dramaturgy for Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George (Villanova Theatre), music direction for Julia Taudevin’s Move, direction of a devised theatre piece titled Built by Fire, and dramaturgy for Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's Little Shop of Horrors (UGA Theatre). Since arriving at UGA, her work has been featured at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (2023 & 2024), the American Society for Theatre Research (2023 & 2024), Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (2024), and UGA's Music Research Symposium (2024). In the spring, Sloan will be directing Kimberly Belflower's John Proctor Is the Villain in the Cellar Theatre. During the following summer, with the help of the Willson Center for the Humanities Graduate Research Award, she will be traveling to Chengdu, Sichuan, China to study dramaturgy in Sichuan opera.

With the moniker “Southern Directurg,” Sloan is passionate about uplifting communities in rural Southern Appalachia and the Deep South through education, community resources, empathy, and art.