Emma Dorfman, PhD Candidate
Emma Dorfman is a PhD candidate with a fully-funded AHRC SGSAH Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with the Traverse Theatre, which is supervised by Dr. Chris Elsden, Professor Melissa Terras, and Ellen Gledhill (Executive Director at Traverse Theatre). Her research explores data-driven approaches to live performance and theatre-making and what opportunities digital distribution, technologies, and assets can offer to the live performance industry.
She is proud graduate of the MA Dramaturgy and Writing for Performance Programme at Goldsmiths in London, where she completed her first full-length play, After. She also received a BFA in Drama with honours in Theatre Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of Drama and was the sole recipient of the Bevya Rosten Memorial Award for excellence in dramaturgy. Her undergraduate thesis published 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. It also addressed digital surveillance as performance, surveillance’s role as both a passive and active participant in spectatorship, and social media’s relationship to surveillance infrastructure as it relates to online identities and performative selves.
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, – where she was Resident Dramaturg – Projekt Europa, the Lucille Lortel Theatre, The Attic Theatre, the New York NeoFuturists, and Fresh Ground Pepper. She is also a visiting lecturer for Birkbeck’s MA Dramaturgy Programme and a reviewer for Fringebiscuit Magazine and Always Time for Theatre. She has been published by Contemporary Theatre Review and the University of Pennsylvania Press.