KEREN ZAIONTZ (Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Ph.D. University of Toronto). Keren joined UBC from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, in 2022, where she held the position of Assistant Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Creative Industries in the Global City in the Department of Film and Media and Cultural Studies Graduate Program. At UBC, she teaches in both Theatre Studies and the Bachelor of Media Studies and offers courses on contemporary performance practices, the intersection between cities, media, and performance, as well as courses on internet culture and what it means to be “terminally online” during the rise of entrepreneurial influencers, the fracture of traditional media industries, and the fall of democracies. Keren is author of Theatre & Festivals (Methuen Drama, 2018), part of the Theatre & series. The book explores the ways in which cultural performances of resistance that have their basis in festivals can migrate to other contexts, making festivals as much the domain of free markets and state power as that of experimental artists and progressive social movements. She is co-editor of numerous special issues and anthologies including, Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas with Natalie Alvarez and Claudette Lauzon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), winner of the ATHE Excellence in Editing Award. Her articles and interviews have appeared in Canadian Theatre Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, PAJ, Performance Research, PUBLIC, TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research in Canada, and Theatre Research International. Her current book project, Spectacles of Stigma in a World Beyond Shame is a cultural examination of global north authoritarian power from the perspective of its “refuseniks”—feminist artists, independent reporters, community advocates, comedians turned presidents, and oppositional proletariats—who risk everything and model perseverance in the face of Shahed drones and far-right propagandists. Keren is principal investigator of the SSHRC-funded project, “Performing the Press Against Autocracy,” with Alessandra Santos, which examines how art collectives in Ukraine and Chile use critical texts and activist performance to enact democratic futures.