Dominika Laster | Executive Director

Dominika Laster is a performance researcher, scholar, and artist. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University (2010). She is the “Concerning Books” Editor at The Drama Review (TDR) and Co-Editor of European Stages.

From 2013-2015, Laster served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Lecturer in the Theater Studies Program at Yale University. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY) from 2011 to 2013.

‪Dominika Laster is a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award from Performance Studies international for her research examining Islamic practices of witnessing within the context of post-9/11 detentions and deportations. Laster’s doctoral dissertation, a critical analysis of key aspects of performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski’s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, earned her the Monroe Lippman Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation.

Laster is the author of Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work (2016). She is the editor of Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland (2015). Laster has also published articles in Performance Research, Slavic and Eastern European Performance, New Theatre Quarterly, and TDR.