Call for Proposals: Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance

Volume 4: Leaders

Co-edited by Eva Aymami-Rene, Anita Gonzalez, and Kimberly Jew

This volume aims to advance scholarship about themes and practices of feminist leadership in theatre, musical theatre, opera, dance, and performance. Recognizing that “leadership” takes different—and sometimes not fully recognized—forms depending on geographical, historical, and aesthetic contexts, this volume seeks to open up the ways in which women have played leadership roles. Women leaders have re-defined leadership through feminist practices, collaborative work, and have often adopted—and adapted—to the imposed limitations on their ability to lead through inventive tactics and practices.

Leaders and acts of leadership are broadly defined. Our volume will decentralize knowledge, consider BIPOC and other epistemologies, and reimagine how woman-centered approaches vary across cultural landscapes. Explorations of women’s leadership innovations in the Global South are welcome.

Guiding questions include:

• What does it mean to innovate within leadership roles?

• How have historical initiatives of leadership emerged across the globe?

• What are the earliest roots and foundations of women’s leadership in the performing arts?

• How have times of crisis, such as the pandemic, affected women’s innovations in performance leadership?

• What strategies exist to cultivate and foster female leadership?

• Who are the contemporary leaders setting groundbreaking new forms today?

• How have leaders negotiated different worlds of performance including Broadway, commercial, regional, non-profit, community, and educational?

• What does feminist collaboration and collective practice look like?

• How have female leaders contributed to the emerging production standards of intimacy and consent work, color conscious casting, as well as self-care initiatives?

• What are the continuing forms of “invisible leadership” among women and women-identifying individuals in performing arts?

• How do women leaders engage issues of gender, racial, ableist, class, and access inequities in the arts?

We seek reflections in a variety of formats that foreground generative approaches to leadership and which address non-traditional ways of thinking about women’s innovations as artists, practitioners, organizers, influencers, path-makers, and inspirers.

Contact Eva Aymami-Rene (eva.aymami-rene@aru.ac.uk), Anita Gonzalez (Anita.Gonzalez@georgetown.edu), and Kimberly Jew (kimberly.jew@utah.edu) if you have questions. 

Abstracts submitted should be 250 words, and include a working title and a description of the methodological approach. Potential contributors should also include a brief (150 word) bio. These should be combined into one MS Word document (Times New Roman, 12-pt, single-spaced) for submission.

New extended deadline for submission of abstracts is April 15, 2023.  Abstracts should be submitted online HERE.