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Scholarly Research & Critical Writing

In my scholarly research, as in my performance practice, I attempt to facilitate conversations and connections between artists, academics, arts (and other) administrators, and activists. To this end, I have published articles in academic journals like Theatre Journal, Performance Research, and TDR: The Drama Review, but also in more popular outlets such as HowlRound and The Arts Politic. My book, Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin (Northwestern University Press, 2021), shows how theater and performance can help us rethink our public institutions both in and beyond the arts. I take the city of Berlin as a paradigmatic case: focusing on the recent restructuring of a number of Berlin’s major public theater infrastructures, and the interdisciplinary performance practices that responded to these shifts, I argue for a new concept of the relationship between art and institutions of its support. Cultural policy, I claim, must be thought of as a performative practice of infrastructural imagining and not just an administrative agenda for delegating funds. Furthermore, understanding performance as itself a form of policy can help us rethink the ways theater artists lean on and into systems of state support as the very means of enacting their transformation. Postdramatic Theatre and Form, a collection I co-edited, was published by Bloomsbury Methuen in 2019. This volume examines both the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance to refine what we mean, and what we don’t, when we speak of “postdramatic” theater.

Institutional Theatrics

Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Articles & Essays