E. Leo Walczyk

I am a gay, nonbinary writer, cultural critic, and native New Yorker. As an undergraduate, my theatre studies focused on direction and performance composition, alongside performance art in the tradition of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. My current research interests lie at the intersection of theatre and performance studies with queer political, cultural, and social histories. I am especially interested in queer political protest movements and queer nightlife as spaces of artistic production, stages on which queer sexual and gender identities are constructed and enacted through public rehearsal and performance. 

Why Performance Studies?

Performance studies provides an interdisciplinary framework that pushes beyond theoretical abstraction and into the material realm of art, politics, and corporeality. I am compelled by the tension between queerness as a private, interior identity and queerness as public performance and embodied practice. The theories and methodologies of performance studies are uniquely suited to analyzing the friction between thinking and doing, between feeling and being.