Faculty

LAURA LEVIN

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

levin@yorku.ca

Laura Levin is a performance theorist and historian 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; site-specific and environmental performance; intercultural performance; photographic theory and performance; disciplinary genealogies in performance studies; and histories of interdisciplinary performance.

A former Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Levin has received numerous awards for her research, including Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship and the Ogden Prize in Theatre History. Her article, “Environmental Affinities: Naturalism and the Porous Body” (in Judith Thompson, ed. Ric Knowles, Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005), was awarded the Robert G. Lawrence emerging scholar prize from the Association for Canadian Theatre Research.

Professor Levin has co-edited a special issue of Theatre Research in Canada on space and subjectivity in performance, and is an editor and ongoing contributor to the Canadian Theatre Review.  She is currently working on a book titled Performing World: Theatre in the Age of the World Picture, which develops alternative strategies for theorizing the relationship between body and environment in performance.

Dr. Levin has extensive experience in theatrical production, and has worked as a director, actor, and dramaturge on a number of shows in Canada and the United States. She directed the American premiere of Tooth and Nail by South Africa’s Junction Avenue Theatre Company, for which she received an Eisner Award in Directing (2005). She served as dramaturge 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’ The Conduct of Life, and Kelly Jo Burke’s Charming and Rose. She is a recipient of 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.