Faculty

LAURA LEVIN

BA (McGill), PhD (University of California, Berkeley)
Associate Professor: Theatre Studies
Department of Theatre, York University

levin@yorku.ca

Laura Levin is a performance theorist and practitioner whose research focuses primarily on contemporary North American theatre and performance art.

Her areas of interest include: performance theory; gender and sexuality in/as performance; urban, site-specific and environmental performance; intermedial and online performance; practice as research; photographic theory and performance; disciplinary genealogies in performance studies.

Professor Levin is associate editor of the Canadian Theatre Review and has edited a number of collections: an issue of Theatre Research in Canada on Space and Subjectivity in Performance; a CTR issue on Performance Art; Conversations Across Borders, a book of dialogues with performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Seagull Press 2010); and Theatre in Toronto (Playwrights Canada Press 2011). Her writing appears in several journals and books including Space and the Geographies of Canadian Theatre (ed. Michael McKinnie), Performance and the City (eds. DJ Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga), and Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research (eds. Lynette Hunter and Shannon Rose Riley).

Dr. Levin has collaborated on a number of transnational performance projects that investigate intersections of performance, geography and digital technologies. Current research projects include: Performing Ground: Camouflage, Space, Performance, a book which develops alternative strategies for theorizing the relationship between body and environment in performance, and The Canadian Performance Studies Project: Mapping the Field, the first major study to theorize and map the field of performance studies in Canada (funded by SSHRC). She chaired Performing the City, the 2006 conference of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and Performing Publics, the 2010 Performance Studies International conference. She currently serves as vice president of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research.

A former Fulbright Scholar, Professor Levin has received a number of awards for her research, including the Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Richard Plant Award for best scholarly essay in English (for “Can the City Speak? Site-Specific Art After Poststructuralism,” in Performance and the City, London, Palgrave, 2009) and CATR’s Robert G. Lawrence Emerging Scholar Prize (for “Environmental Affinities: Naturalism and the Porous Body,” in Judith Thompson, ed. Ric Knowles, Toronto, Playwrights Canada Press, 2005).

Dr. Levin has extensive experience in theatrical production and teaches courses at York in the areas of devised theatre and practice as research. She has worked as a director, actor and dramaturg on a number of shows in Canada and the US. She directed the U.S. premiere of Tooth and Nail by South Africa's Junction Avenue Theatre Company, for which she received an Eisner Award in Directing (2005) and served as dramaturg for the world premiere of Foe, adapted from the novel by J.M. Coetzee. Other directing/dramaturgy credits include Joan Schenkar’s Signs of Life, Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone, Maria Irene Fornes’s The Conduct of Life, and Kelly Jo Burke's Charming and Rose. She is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Mark Goodson Award for Distinguished Theatrical Talent.

As a teacher and scholar, Professor Levin aims to stimulate discussion about the overlapping histories that shape performance as an interdisciplinary art, and to promote an understanding of performance as an intercultural and globalized practice. She was selected as an “unsung hero” in Berkeley’s 2005 Undergrad Experience Survey, a citation recognizing her work with students as a director and teacher. She joined the faculty in the Department of Theatre at York University in 2005 and is cross-appointed with York’s Graduate Program in Communication and Culture.