Kelly Kingsbury Brunetto

Kelly Kingsbury Brunetto is an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches and coordinates the Basic Spanish Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education and the University of Notre Dame. She possesses expertise in Spanish, theatre, Second Language Acquisition and foreign language pedagogy, and she has extensive experience teaching college Spanish, acting, directing and designing for stage productions. She specializes in using target-language theatre production and performance to foster language learning, taking advantage of theatre’s unique demands and opportunities, such as memorization of texts, use of gesture and movement, and assuming the identity of a character, to help students experience the target language in a new and profound way. She also explores how engaging in theatre changes classroom relationships between and among students and instructors, flattening hierarchies and fostering new types of collaboration and communication. She has worked on a wide range of productions of texts ranging from classical to modern, including Cervantes’ El retablo de las maravillas and El viejo celoso, Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna, Sabina Berman’s Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda and ¿Águila o sol? and Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, as well as the debut performance of La fuente de los sauces by Marta Briones Alcalá. She has presented her qualitative research on the learning environment of target-language theatre productions at national and international conferences. She is also an accomplished musician, singer and dancer, performing with a number of groups in the South Bend, IN and Madison, WI areas. She currently resides in Lincoln, Nebraska with her husband and daughter.

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