Dr Diana Damian Martin

BA, MA, PhD, AFHEA
Job title
Senior Lecturer, Performance Arts

Profile

I am a mixed heritage Romanian-born academic, educator and artist working with performance as a practice and critical lens. I studied performance making at Central before moving on to complete a Masters in sociology of theatre and performance at Goldsmiths College and was a Royal Holloway and Bedford Excellence scholar at Royal Holloway, University of London where I completed my doctoral project, Criticism as Political Event which explored transnational experimental critical practices that challenge established paradigms of critique through the lens of racial capitalism, colonial logics and abolitionist practice.

My research sits at the intersection of performance, cultural and political philosophies. I am interested in border-work as a methodology of examining new political formations and anti-colonial imaginaries, be they through critical, political or artistic acts, feminist and queer modes of exchange and experimental cultures of critique, publishing and reflection. I also explore constructions of ‘Eastern Europe’ as they relate to movement, labour and aesthetic circulations, and emergent cross-border political grammars. I am also invested in modes of collaborative and cooperative practice across different ecologies of knowledge and art.

Research activities include: a project on aesthetics of discontinuity through exploration of balconies in postsocialist urban centres; a transnational network for experimental criticism; Collaborative Critique, a transnational project exploring strategies for collaborative practice in non-conforming performance criticism; co-organising the 16th International Symposium of Theatre Critics and Theatre Scholars, with Sterijino Pozorje, Novi Sad, Serbia, Collective Works: examining collectivity in contemporary performance; Crisis in the Humanities project led by Professor Kim Solga exploring how performance can act as a critical paradigm in the neoliberal university. My co-edited special issue of Performance Philosophy Journal expands Hannah Arendt’s thinking into posthumanism, feminist political practices and phenomenologies of gesture and absence. I have published widely on experimental dramaturgies and across media for Contemporary Theatre Review, Research in Drama Education, Theatre, Performance Philosophy, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training and chapters for publications by Routledge, Intellect, Bloomsbury Methuen and Palgrave, for whom I also regularly peer review. My edited book (states of) wake: Dedicating Performance, explored the dedication as a critical companion in performance, a collaboration with ]performance s p a c e[ in Folkestone, and On Time: a SPILL Reader for Pacitti Company, a collection of critical, poetic and reflective texts about the 2018 edition of SPILL Festival of Performance.

I edit Performance Philosophy Journal’s section for nonconforming writing, Margins, and sit on the editorial boards of Critical Stages and Journal for Body, Space and Technology. I sit on the Performance Studies International board as Lexicon Officer, and was a member of the organisation’s Future Advisory Board. I am Co-Research Officer (Awards) for Theatre and Performance Research Association, where I also co-convened he Association’s Working Group for Documenting Performance. I am co-host of the Department of Feminist Conversations and Something Other, and a member of practice research collective Generative Constraints. I am cofounding director of Migrants in Culture, which began in 2018 as an advocacy network making visible the impact of the Hostile Environment on the cultural sector, and become a community interest company in 2021 working at the intersection between art, culture and migrant justice organising.

I have been working in the theatre and performance sectors for over a decade as a curator, writer and artist. I often collaborate with others to develop projects that hold space to experiment with how we think and reflect together; and I have led artist-schools and projects with a number of festivals, including SPILL Festival of Performance- SPILL Writing for over five years, as well as for festivals in Berlin (Tanz), Bruxelles (Trouble), Norway (Stamsund, Bergen), Porto (FITEI) and Australia (Next Wave). In my artistic work I work with critical writing, speculative fiction and text-based performance. I’ve explored moving across borders; mapping auto-fictions in and through correspondence; deploying the speculative as a strategy for another kind of intimacy; the formal materials of distance; examining bodies and their movement across- a choreography of regulations, poetics and relations. I also collaborate with Serbo-Romanian cooperative Critical Interruptions, and recent works include a collaboration on migrant perspectives on the local for Home Live Art and Patrolling, a critical conversation for the digital page on border patrols of unrecognised states.

My pedagogic experience outside of Central includes working at institutions such as King’s College, Royal Holloway, Queen Mary, University of London, The Politics and Creative Writing Departments at Royal Holloway, The Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster University, the Political Theory Group at the London School of Economics, as well as internationally in Europe and the US. I have experience teaching across undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels, as well as in education projects outside of higher education. My journey has seen me work extensively both in conservatoire training and in specialist departments at larger universities. I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy .

I am a member of Performance Philosophy Network, Performance Studies International, Theatre and Performance Research Association and the Political Studies Association.

Areas of Expertise

  • Experimental performance criticism, performance writing and non-conforming creative critical practices
  • Transnational feminism
  • Migrancy and borders in and beyond performance
  • Performance Philosophy
  • Live art, experimental performance
  • Cultural and aesthetic politics
  • Eastern Europe
  • Interdisciplinary research
  • Performance Pedagogy

PhD Supervision

I am currently supervising doctoral projects in the areas of feminist criticism, feminist performance, border-work and transnational performance, co-research on transnational solidarities with Eastern European migrant communities in the UK, abolitionist practice and cultural politics. I have successfully supervised doctoral projects on critical passivity and embedded criticism. I have externally examined four doctoral projects in the areas of feminist digital performance, diasporic and migrant-led performance practice, self-censorship in theatre and cultural work and political ecologies of practice.

I welcome doctoral students in any of my areas of research.

Key Publications

Co-Edited Volume

2018. Edited collection. On Time: A SPILL Reader. Ipswich: Pacitti Company.

2018. Edited collection. (states of) WAKE: Dedicating Performance. Folkestone: performance space. 2018. Co-Edited collection with Bojana Janković. Critical Interruptions Vol 1: Steakhouse LIVE. London: Live Art Development Agency.

Articles

2023. ‘The First Thing We Make is the Conditions of our Meeting: A gathering on gathering’ with Schmidt, Theron, Douglas, Mick, Mirabi, Reza, O’Brien, Ellen, Shah, Rajni, Smith, Val, Thomson, Lizzie and Vulcan, Julie. in Performance Research: On Meeting 28:2, pp 14-25.

2022. ‘Metered Togetherness: Affective Drifts and Temporal Proximities’ with Kimmel, Anna Jayne and Warren, Asher in TDR: The Drama Review 66:4, pp 127-142

2021. Book Review. ‘Productive Ruptures: The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics by Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan’ for Performance Research: On Diffraction 25:5, pp. 144-145

2020. ‘Body states and cross-territorial choreographies’ in Contemporary Theatre Review -Interventions- European Performance in Troubled Times. In translation in Spanish.

2019. ‘Hopeful acts in troubled times: thinking as interruption and the poetics of nonconforming criticism’ in Performance Philosophy Special Issue: Hannah Arendt and Performance.

2019. ’A Conversation on “Post-Brexit Eurocentrism” and Non-Eurocentric Pedagogy’, with Faisal Hamadah, Ella Parry Davies and Michael Shane Boyle, Contemporary Theatre Review 29.3.

2019. ‘Surviving but not thriving: the politics of care and the experience of motherhood in academia’, with Katharine Low, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance Special Issue: Crisis in the Humanities: Creative Pedagogies, Neoliberal Realities, 24:3.

2019. ’Tactics: Practical and Imagined’ with Sharon Green, Clara Nizard, Theron Schmidt, Max Shulman and Kim Solga, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance Special Issue: Crisis in the Humanities: Creative Pedagogies, Neoliberal Realities, 24:3.

2019. ’Break-Up Variations: An annotated score’ in Performance Philosophy Journal, upcoming.

2019. ’Letters to (of) the Future’ co-authored, Department of Feminist Conversations in Global Performance Studies, 2:2.

2018. ‘And the Vampires Flow Towards the West: The Ecological Poetics of Eastern European Migration in the UK’ in Global Performance Studies, 2:1

2018. ‘Collectivity and Criticism: Fragments of Conversations on Post-Dance’ in Critical Stages Issue 17

2017. ‘The Library of Unfinished Texts’ in Performance Research: On Libraries, eds Deirdre Heddon and Misha Meyers, Vol 22: No 2.

2016. ’Deliberation, embodiment and oral criticism: a case study on Spill Festival of Performance’ in Critical Stages, 13.

2016. ’Unpeeling action: critical writing, training and process’ in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal, Special Issue: Showing and Writing Training.

Book Chapters

2022. ‘An electronic conversation on bridges, pregnancies, bookends and encountering histories’ in Performing Collaboration in Solo Performance: A Duet Without You and Practice as Research (London: Intellect)

2021. ’Unruly Fragments: What Happens When [] is removed?’ with Maddy Costa, Holly Revell and Mary Paterson in Mishandled Archive by Tara Fatehi Irani (Intellect: London)

2019. ‘Between art and criticism: a phenomenological poiesis’ in Performance Phenomenology: The Things Themselves, edited by Matthew Wagner and Jodie McNelly, ( London: Palgrave).

2018. ’Criticism as a Political Event’ in Pettersen, Anette and Veie, Maria (eds). Criticism for An Absent Reader. Oslo: Uten Tittel.

2017. ‘Virtual embodiment: critical writing and liveness’ in The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, edited by Emily Orley and Katja Hilevaara (London: Routledge).

2016. ‘Criticism as a Political Event’ in Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes. Edited by Duska Radosavlijevic (London: Bloomsbury).

2016. ‘Community/Resistance: Reflections on discourse and community’ in Audience ( R )evolution: Taking the Stage, edited by Caridad Svitch (New York: Theatre Communications Group).

2015. ‘Riding Romance: Three Brief Scenes on Performance, Aesthetics and Territory’, Nebelmeer: Riding Romance Trilogy, edited by Anette Pettersen. Oslo: BIT. pp. 25-30.

2015. ‘Werner Schwab: Poetics of Radical Dramaturgy’ in Dead At Last, At Last No More Air by Werner Schwab, trans. Meredith Oakes. pp. 19-36.

2012. ‘The Politics of Difference: Conversation Pieces’ in M21: From Medieval to 21st Century’edited by DASH (London: DASH/Live Art Development Agency), pp. 6-10.

Editing Projects

2021. ‘Theatre Criticism for Young Audiences: New Directions’ for Critical Stages 22, co-edited with Anette Therese Pettersen and Rui Pina Coelho

2019. ’Sites of Appearance, Matters of Thought: Hannah Arendt and Performance Philosophy’, Special Issue of Performance Philosophy co-edited with Theron Schmidt, June 2019.

2014. Co-Editor, ‘Theatre and Politics’, Platform: Journal for Theatre and Performance.

Reports

2019. ‘ What is the impact of the Hostile Environment on the Cultural Sector? Your workplace. Your experience.’ Report for Migrants in Culture.

2016. International Association of Theatre Critics, ‘Pedagogies of Criticism’- Joint Report on Young Critics Seminar at Interferences Festival, Cluj Digital Publication.

External Practice

2021-2022, Remote…Local by Critical Interruptions commissioned by Home Live Art

2021. Spells for a border town commissioned by performing borders

2020. Temporary Works: Covid-19 update by performing borders | LIVE

2019. Patrolling, commissioned by performing borders | LIVE

2018. Archives of Now, commissioned for EDGE 88 (Live Art Development Agency, Artsadmin) 2015-2019. Event-series, Department of Feminist Conversations

2017-2019. Co-Host, ‘Something Other Live’, quarterly salon readings at the Peckham Pelican

2014-2017. Event-series, Exhibition and Round-table discussion, Critical Interruptions

2017. ’A Cartography of Shifting Exits’ in Hill, Lesie and Paris, Helen. The Artist’s Borderpanic Compendium. London: Live Art Development Agency

2016. Roaming Assembly: A Public Salon on Feminism and Criticism, The Culture Capital Exchange, London- Bloomsbury, Project Lead

2016. Host, Department of Feminist Conversations and Tim Etchells, Tate Exchange

Register of Interest

Nothing to declare