International Conversation on Theatre and Crisis

Bios

Dr Lisa Peschel is senior lecturer at the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media, University of York (UK). Her articles on theatrical performance in the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto have appeared in journals in the US and the UK as well as Czech, German and Israeli publications. She was a co-investigator on the £1.8 million project 'Performing the Jewish Archive' funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (Nov 2014-June 2018), during which she reconstructed scripts from the ghetto for performance in the US, the UK, the Czech Republic, Australia and South Africa. Her anthology Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto, was published in 2014 (Czech- and German-language edition 2008).

Victor Dugga is Dean at the Faculty of Arts, Federal University of Lafia and has been involved in the use of applied theatre as a strategy for health communication on issues of family planning, population growth and HIV/AIDS education as well as conflict mediation in rural and urban settings. His research interests span various aspects of Theatre and Social transformation processes in Africa. His cultural work includes a decade of extensive experience with the African Union on culture and heritage protection. Dugga’s play, Hope Harvesters, won the 2009 Association of Nigerian Authors’ prize for drama. His latest play, Gidan Juju has just been released.

Emine Fişek is assistant professor at Boğaziçi University and the author of Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Theatre and Community (Red Globe Press, 2019). She has published articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Text and Performance Quarterly, Comparative Drama and French Cultural Studies. Her current research is on the impact that cultural memory, urban transformation and international migration have had on Turkish theatre in the twenty-first century.

Avra Sidiropoulou is Αcademic Ηead at the M.A. in Theatre Studies Programme at the Open University of Cyprus and Artistic Director of Athens-based Persona Theatre Company. She is the author of: Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method (Routledge 2018) and Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan 2011). She was a Visiting Researcher at MIT and CUNY, the Freie University, the Centre for Global Shakespeare and the Universities of Surrey, Leeds and Tokyo (Japan Foundation Fellow). Currently, she is editing an international collection on theatre and 21st century crisis (forthcoming Routledge). Avra was nominated for the League of Professional Theatre Women Gilder/Goigney International Award 2020.

Siyuan Liu is associate professor of theatre at the University of British Columbia and editor of Asian Theatre Journal. His books include Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China (author, Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre (editor, 2016), Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900-2000 (co-author, Methuen 2014), and The Methuen Drama Anthology of Modern Asian Plays (co-editor, 2014). He has two books forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press: Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theatre in the 1950s and Early 1960s (author) and Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theatres of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era (co-editor).