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Dr. Sandoval is an Associate Teaching Professor at Barrett the Honors College in Downtown Phoenix. He is also an ASU Social Transformation Lab Fellow and a member of ASU's Chicano /Latino Faculty & Staff Association. Dr. Sandoval holds a PhD in Culture & Performance from UCLA, an MA in Individualized Study with a focus on Performance Studies from NYU, and a BA in English with a focus on Performance at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Dr. Sandoval is currently researching the transborder holiday Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). He focuses on the holiday's popular history of the holiday as it has circulated in mass media, art exhibitions, tourism, and cinema. He also conducts ethnographic research on large-scale public celebrations of the holiday in Mexico and the US Southwest in order to examine the ways the holiday has developed from ancient Mesoamerican ritual to mass media spectacle. His research analyzes issues of performance, transnationalism, interculturalism, race, hybridity, indigeneity, spirituality, and cultural appropriation & commodification. Furthermore, he writes about the way Day of the Dead intersects with his experiences coming of age as a working-class mixed-race Chicano.
Dr. Sandoval teaches Barrett's core seminar The Human Event. Additonally, he teaches a variety of upper-division seminars. These have included: Urban Arts & Cultures; Race and Performance; Cultural Theory and Pop Culture; Disney Films & Cultural Theory, Radical Activism in Theory and Practice; 21st Century Documentary Film; and Urban Poverty, Race, and Art. He also directs Barrett's New York City summer travel program Culture and Performance in the Global City, and operates Barrett’s Spain-Morocco summer abroad program Crossroads of Civilization.
In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Mathew has also enjoyed a career in the arts. He has performed stories and poetry in the US and abroad. He toured internationally as a dancer with choreographer Louis Kavouras. He is a certified teacher of the “Expressive Actor” technique, working under the tutelage of master teacher Michael Lugering. In New York City Mathew worked as a performer, writer, and director with various experimental theatre companies and choreographers, before founding his own performance company – First Function. He was as an art and performance critic for The Brooklyn Rail and Downtown Express. He also served as an education and curatorial assistant for Performa, New York’s premiere arts organization dedicated to live performance. In Los Angeles he performed and toured with choreographer Maria Gillespie’s Oni Dance ensemble. He was also featured in the 2013 independent film Down and Dangerous by Sabi. Mathew recently served as the Associate Artistic Director for Kristina Wong’s audience-immersive performance Discharges from American History staged in New York’s historic Washington Square Hotel, which featured ASU Barrett students making their New York theatre debut as historical re-enactors. Mathew also hosts the Race & Revolution film series at the Majestic Theatre in Tempe.