Emma Dorfman is a PhD researcher with a fully-funded AHRC SGSAH Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with the Traverse Theatre, which is supervised by Chris Elsden, Melissa Terras, and Ellen Gledhill (Executive Director, Traverse Theatre). Her research explores a strand of performance practice she calls ‘digitally site-specific theatre’, which consists of productions staged in and made for a particular digital site (i.e., social media platforms, XR technologies, video games, mobile apps).

Emma is currently working with the Traverse Theatre to re-launch their new work development programme, considering how young playwrights might write for immersive and/or digital performance. She is also currently working as a Research Assistant on an XR Labs Funded project re-imagining cross-rendering audio for immersive hybrid performance environments. Additionally, she is the subject editor for Digital Theatre and Performance for the Routledge Performance Archive.

Previously, Emma has been an academic tutor at the University of Edinburgh, a visiting lecturer for Birkbeck’s MA Dramaturgy Programme, and has been published by Contemporary Theatre Review. She is a proud graduate of the MA Dramaturgy and Writing for Performance Programme at Goldsmiths and New York University’s Tisch School of Drama. Her undergraduate thesis submitted in April 2020, ‘Apart, Together: Networked Spectatorship in a Virulent Age’, was a prescient examination of theatre’s radical shift to the digital space in the early stages of the Pandemic.

In addition to her academic and research practice, she is also a dramaturg, theatre critic, performer, and creative facilitator who has worked with theatre companies and collectives internationally, including Life Jacket Theatre Company (as Resident Dramaturg), Projekt Europa, Lucille Lortel Theatre, The Attic , the New York NeoFuturists, and Fresh Ground Pepper.