OLIVIA MICHIKO GAGNON, BA Hons (U. Toronto), MA (NYU), PhD (NYU), is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Theatre & Film at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in performance studies, with research and teaching interests in minoritarian performance, cultural production, and multimedia aesthetic practice; critical race and ethnic studies; feminist and queer theory; critical Indigenous studies; archival theory; and performative writing. She is currently working on her first monograph, which brings together a transnational cohort of feminist, Indigenous, and of color artists in order to theorize closeness as a feminist and decolonial method of doing history beyond the archive and through art and performance. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, emisférica, Syndicate, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, where she was Managing Editor from 2017 – 2019 and is co-editor (with James McMaster) of a special issue titled The Between: Couple Forms, Performing Together. She has also written for the Vancouver Art Gallery (with Monika Kin Gagnon) and was formerly Managing Editor of HemiPress at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in New York City. She received her PhD and MA from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, and has taught at NYU, Tufts, and Harvard University.

Dissertation Title

Archival Entanglements: Re/Encountering History in Contemporary Decolonial, Feminist, and Queer Art and Performance

Why PS @ NYU?

Performance Studies appealed to me for the way it both enables and encourages students to think across disciplines, genres, and media. I was also drawn to Performance Studies' emphasis on creative methodologies, the importance of practice, and the intimate relationship between aesthetics and politics. Finally, I chose Performance Studies because of the way in which one of its paradigmatic shifts––from the question of what something is to the question of what something does––radically enriched and expanded my thinking about contemporary art and performance.