CS Issue No 31 Editors

Roberta Levitow – director, dramaturg, teacher and producer – directed over fifty productions in NYC, LA, and nationally. Co-founder and co-director of Theatre Without Borders, with a current focus on performance and the climate crisis. Co-initiated the Climate Change Theatre Action in partnership with the Arts & Climate Initiative. Co-initiated The Acting Together on the World Stage Project at Brandeis University. From 2004-2019, Senior Artistic Associate, Sundance Institute Theatre Program’s East Africaand Middle East/North Africa initiatives. Co-creator, with Kenyan musician Eric Wainaina, of the Nairobi Musical Theatre Initiative (NBOMTI), with faculty from NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Honoree at 2003 Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre and the 1992 Alan Schneider Award. Fulbright Specialist teaching assignments Ethiopia 2018, Uganda 2007, Romania 2005, and Hong Kong 2003. Work featured in The New York Times, American Theatre Magazine, Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Writing the World: On Globalization and RoundUp (League of Professional Theatre Women in NYC). Stanford University graduate. Faculty at UCLA and Bennington College. Member of The Think Tank of The Lab for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. www.robertalevitow.com 

Chantal Bilodeau is a Montreal-born, New York-based playwright whose work focuses on the intersection of storytelling, live performance, and the climate crisis. In her capacity as founding artistic director of the Arts & Climate Initiative, she has spearheaded projects for nearly two decades, engaging communities in the U.S. and abroad in climate action through live events, talks, publications, workshops, artist convenings, and a worldwide distributed theatre festival. Her plays have been presented in a dozen countries and translated into French, Norwegian, Greek, and Portuguese. She is currently working on a series of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes facing the eight Arctic states. She is a Creative Core member of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics and an incoming PhD student in English at the University of Victoria in Canada. In 2019, she was named one of “8 Trailblazers Who Are Changing the Climate Conversation” by Audubon Magazine. 

Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she specializes in contemporary Anglophone theatre. She earned her PhD. from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with a dissertation on the reception of ancient Greek tragic myth in Latino/american theatre. She later conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Athens’ Department of Theatre Studies, focusing on the use of myth-based digital theatre in adult education. Delikonstantinidou has co-edited special issues of academic journals and published extensively in both Greek and international journals and edited volumes. She has also presented her work at numerous conferences in Greece and abroad. Her monograph, Latinx Reception of Greek Tragic Myth: Healing (and) Radical Politics, was published by Peter Lang in 2020. Her latest paper, “Emotional Literacy via the System for Digital Theatre in Education,” appears in the forthcoming volume Stanislavsky and Emotion: Approaches Through Language & Culture (Routledge). Her research interests include contemporary theatre, reception studies, digital humanities and ecocriticism.

Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus in Theatre Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he has taught at the School of English for close to 35 years. He has also taught at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Hellenic Open University and the graduate program of the Theatre Department of Aristotle University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of another thirteen. His two-volume study, Theatre, Society, Nation (2010), was awarded first prize for best theatre study of the year. In 2019 his book Theatre & Theory II: About Topoi, Utopias and Heterotopias was published by University Studio Press. In 2022 his book-length study Comedy’s Encomium: The Seriousness of Laughter, was also published by University Studio Press. In addition to his academic activities, he writes theatre reviews for various journals. He is on the Executive Committee of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, a member of the curators’ team of Forest International Festival (organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece), and the editor-in-chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics.

Yana Meerzon is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Ottawa. With four single authored books and nine co-edited collections, most recently Performing Nationalism in Russia (Cambridge UPress, 2024) and Palgrave Handbook on Theatre and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023; with Steve Wilmer), Professor Yana Meerzon, specializes in theoretical approaches to contemporary performance and dramaturgy, questions of displacement, multilingualism, and identity politics. For the past two decades, Professor Meerzon has been studying theatrical representations of migration created by migrant artists in Europe and North America. With the rise of political populism, religious fundamentalism, and nationalism, she turned to the issues of borders and politics of nation building, within which today’s practices and discussions of global migration take place. A former President of Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR, 2020-2022), Meerzon is a co-editor of the journal Critical Stages, published by International Association of Theatre Critics, and also is a co-editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Performance and Migration (with Steve Wilmer).

Matti Linnavuori wrote theatre criticism between 1978 and 2013 for various newspapers and weeklies in his native Finland. In 1985, he worked for the BBC World Service in London. Since 1998, he has presented papers at numerous IATC events. In the 2000s, he wrote for Teatra Vestnesis in Latvia. Since 1992, he has written and directed several radio plays for YLE the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In March 2016, his play Ta mig till er ledare (Take me to your leader) premiered at Lilla Teatern in Helsinki.

Don Rubin is Managing Editor of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques. He is the General Editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and founding Editor of Canada’s national theatre quarterly Canadian Theatre Review. He is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at York University in Toronto and Founding Director and Former Chair of both York’s Department of Theatre and its MA/PhD Program in Theatre and Performance Studies. His volume Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings is a standard volume on the subject. He is a trustee of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship and President of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (doubtaboutwill.org).