OLIVIA MICHIKO GAGNON, BA Hons (U. Toronto), MA (NYU), PhD (NYU), specializes in performance studies, with research and teaching interests in minoritarian performance, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and queer theory, critical Indigenous studies, and performative/experimental writing. She is currently finishing her first monograph––On Closeness: Archives, Performance, and Forms of Relation––which theorizes closeness as a multivalent minoritarian method of doing history otherwise, through art & performance and beyond archival stricture. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Text & Performance Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, emisférica, Syndicate, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, where she was Managing Editor from 2017 – 2019 and is co-editor (with James McMaster) of a special issue titled The Between: Couple Forms, Performing Together. She has also written for the Vancouver Art Gallery (with Monika Kin Gagnon), the Belkin Gallery, Gallery 44, and the New Museum, and was formerly Managing Editor of HemiPress at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in New York City. She received her PhD and MA from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, and has taught at NYU, Tufts, and Harvard University. At UBC, she is Affiliated Faculty in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration (ACAM) Studies and Faculty Associate at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice (GRSJ).

Select Publications:

 “Moving Through Crisis in Mariana Valencia’s Solo B,” Text & Performance Quarterly (2023).

“Tender Archives and the Closeness of Cheryl Sim’s The Thomas Wang Project.” Women & Performance:a journal of feminist theory. 31, no. 1 (2021).

“On Gratitude.” Syndicate (Symposium on Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements). 2020.

“Singing-With Nanook of the North: On Tanya Tagaq, Feeling Entangled, and Colonial Archives of Indigeneity.” ASAP/Journal 5, no. 1 (2020).

With James McMaster. “Introduction: The Between.” Special Issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 29, no. 3 (2019).

“In/hospitality & Un/inhabitability: Three Scenes in the Work of Lido Pimienta.” Canadian Theatre Review 177 (2019).

With Monika Kin Gagnon. “Gifts of Fringe.” In Dana Claxton, edited by Grant Arnold. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2018.