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, cultural and performance studies, theatre and the city, mediated urbanism, and media studies. 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 Edited Works 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, Authoritarian Upsurges, is a cultural examination of global north authoritarian power from the perspective of its “refuseniks”—dissident artists, independent reporters, and oppositional proletariats—who risk everything and model perseverance in the face of repressive rule.