John Gentile
Professor and Chair

John S. Gentile received his M.A. (1980) and Ph.D. (1984) in Performance Studies from Northwestern University upon completing his B.A. (1978) in Dramatic Arts and English from the State University of New York, Geneseo. After completing a year teaching at the University of Northern Iowa, Gentile assumed a faculty appointment at Kennesaw State University in 1985 where he currently serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies.

Gentile teaches classes in solo performance, storytelling, myth, performance art, and adapting literary texts for the stage. His directing credits include his original adaptations of major works of folk and literary narrative such as: Over Nine Waves: Celtic Mythtelling from Ancient Ireland, Jack of Beech Mountain: Folktales from Southern Appalachia, Tales from the Brothers Grimm, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told-Tales, The Bell Witch and Other Legends: Ghostly Stories from the American South, American Gothic: Stories by American Masters of the Macabre, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and The Hero’s Journey: Mythic Stories of the Heroic Quest, which was featured as a plenary session at the international Mythic Journeys conference celebrating the centennial of Joseph Campbell’s birth.

Gentile is the author of Cast of One: One-Person Shows form the Chautauqua Platform to the Broadway Stage (University of Illinois Press), a history of American solo performance.  His articles have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Studies in Popular Culture, On the Culture of the American South, The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, and Eighteenth-Century British and American Rhetorics and Rhetoricians. He has presented his research at conferences for the National Communication Association, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Chautauqua Network, Popular Culture Association, Performance Studies International, Southeastern Nineteenth Century Studies Association, American Humanists Association, Southeastern Theatre Conference, Georgia Communication Association, and has served as the keynote speaker and performer at national performance festivals. He has served on the executive boards of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association, the Southern Order of Storytellers, and on the faculty for the Leadership Institute of the Executive M.B.A. Program at the University of Chicago. Currently, he is the Chair of the Storytelling in Higher Education Special Interest Group of the National Storytelling Network.  He is the founding co-editor with Joseph Sobol of the new academic journal, Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies, and serves as an associate editor of the National Communication Association journal Text and Performance Quarterly.

As an actor and storyteller, Gentile has performed throughout the metro-Atlanta area. He has performed at Theatre Gael, the Roswell Magnolia Storytelling Festival, the Winter Storytelling Festival, Theatre in the Square, and 7 Stages. In 2000, the City of Roswell presented him with The President's Award for his service to the community in establishing the annual Roswell Magnolia Storytelling Festival. He has led storytelling study tours in Celtic myth to Ireland's mythic and early sacred sites. Additionally, Gentile has served as a scholar-performer with the Wyoming Chautauqua, Rocky Mountain Chautauqua and Tulsa Chautauqua public humanities programs in the summers of 1985, 1989, 1990, and 2000. In 2003, he received the Distinguished Teaching and Distinguished Scholarship Awards from the College of the Arts at Kennesaw State University.  In 2004, he received the College of the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award for a second time and was named a finalist for the university’s Distinguished Scholarship award.

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