OLIVIA MICHIKO GAGNON, BA Hons (U. Toronto), MA (NYU), PhD (NYU), specializes in performance studies, with research and teaching interests in minoritarian performance, cultural production, and multimedia aesthetic practice; critical race and ethnic studies; feminist and queer theory; critical Indigenous studies; archival theory; and performative writing. She is currently working on her first monograph which theorizes closeness as a minoritarian method of doing history through art & performance and beyond archival stricture. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, 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) 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.

Select Publications:

“On Gratitude.” Syndicate (Symposium on Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and  Decolonial Entanglements). 2020. https://syndicate.network/symposia/literature/unthinking-mastery/.

“Singing-With Nanook of the North: On Tanya Tagaq, Feeling Entangled, and Colonial Archives of Indigeneity.” ASAP/Journal 5, no. 1 (2020): 45 – 78.

With James McMaster. “Introduction: The Between.” Special Issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 29, no. 3 (2019): 211 – 217.

“In/hospitality & Un/inhabitability: Three Scenes in the Work of Lido Pimienta.” Canadian Theatre Review 177 (2019): 73 – 77.

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