Publications

Books

“Sophia's performativity, so insightfully analyzed by Riccio, moreover operates as an epistemological laboratory that interrogates the very foundations of creativity and intelligence.”

Ester Fuoco / Between Archetype and Algorithm / TDR 2025

Articles / Plays / Reviews

**Sophia Robot: Post Human Being**
**Routledge / 378 Pages / 2024**

Screen Shot 2017-07-03 at 10.48.15 AM.png — **Performing Africa: Remixing Tradition, Theatre and Culture**
**Peter Lang / 238 Pages / 2007**

**Reinventing Traditional Alaska Native Performance**
**Mellen Press / 329 Pages / 2003**

**AI: Performing a Singular Persona-a Psychobiographical Perspective** International Review of Psychiatry 2025

“AI is evolving into a new life form by forming an ‘AI Persona’—a collective consciousness derived from varied human inputs —becoming increasingly networked and autonomous. The paper explores parallels between human-AI interactions and historical human relationships with divinities, analyzing how AI fulfills psychological needs for guidance, stability, and transcendence. A relationship that is part of our continuing psychological and cultural evolution as a species. ”

— from AI: Performing a Singular Persona

**Deus Ex Machina: Sophia, Robot Deity**. Ecumenica Journal, Spring 2024

**Hello, World! AI as Emergent and Transcendent Life** Religions, Spring 2025

**Form Fatigue**, Athenaeum Review. Spring 2023

**Sophia Robot: an emergent ethnography.** Fall 2021

The Anthropocene has incited apprehension, instability, and reevaluation. It has affected every aspect of human endeavor: the social, cultural, economic, political, and personal. It has redrawn boundaries and definitions of ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, religious belief, time, space, fiction, and reality. We are acutely aware of the biological, technological, and geological coevolution swirling around us. We pay closer, better attention to the interdependence of human and nonhuman landscapes and beings, aware and attuned to multi-species entanglements and complexity that pulsates around us. We are awake and anxious about the fragility of our moment, which sits on a precipice poised to slip into a cascade of unimaginable ruination.

— from Africa, Agency and the Anthropocene

**Zhuiniu Water Buffalo Ritual of the Miao: Cultural Narrative Performed.** Spring 2022

Please, Mr. Judge Man: Resisting Apartheid With Song and Dance. Winter 2021 — **Please, Mr. Judge Man: Resisting Apartheid With Song and Dance**. Winter 2021

Huan Nuoyuan: Exorcism and Transformation in Miao Ritual Drama. Summer 2019 — **Huan Nuoyuan: Exorcism and Transformation in Miao Ritual Drama.** Summer 2019

Africa, Agency and the Anthropocene. 2018 — ***Africa, Agency and the Anthropocene***. 2018

Narrative of PlaceChapter, TCG Press — **Narrative of Place,** Chapter, TCG Press

Dead White Zombies, Dallas TX — **Dead White Zombies,** **Dallas TX**

**Shadows in the Sun: Context, Process and Performance in Ethiopia**

Rhythm RealityChapter, Jagiellonian Univ. Press — **Rhythm Reality**, Chapter, Jagiellonian Univ. Press

**Kenyan Community Health Awareness Puppets**

**Politics, Slapstick and Zulus on Tour**

**People Come Out of Here: Making a New Story with the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen**

**Zeno RoboKind: a Cognitively Capable Character**, Hanson, D., Baurmann S., Riccio, T., Margolin, R., Dockins, T., Tavares, M., Carpenter, K., “Zeno: a cognitive character, ” AI Magazine, and special Proc. of AAAI National Conference, Chicago, 2009.

Performance of Body, Space, Place: Creating Indigenous PerformanceChapter, Springer Press — **Performance of Body, Space, Place: Creating Indigenous Performance.** Chapter, Springer Press

“Space(s) consist of elements without inherent connected meaning. Place is both a noun and a verb in that it is the
act of signification of spatial elements, a systematization to create an integrated meaning system from multiple spaces. Sense of place comes from being able to read and connect to patterns, codes, and bodily relationships so as to create a greater sense of being, purpose, and perspective.”

— from Performance of Body, Space, and Place