Academic & Critic
(Greece/Grèce)
Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. For many years he also taught at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece and the Hellenic Open 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 currently the president 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.
Academic & Critic
(USA/États-Unis)
Jeffrey Eric Jenkins is Professor of Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He served as Head of the Department of Theatre from 2012 to 2017 and set the department on a course that resulted in greatly enhanced engagement with online education, financial stability, and improved national rankings. With his creative partner, director Daniel Sullivan, Jenkins has provided new plays with fully realized productions, including works by David Auburn and Donald Margulies. Executive editor of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, he has published hundreds of articles in major newspapers, reference books and scholarly journals. Jenkins has also published nine books of theatre reference, history, and criticism. He is president of AICT-IATC.
Academic & Critic
(Canada)
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).
Publisher, Critic
(England/Angleterre)
Ian Herbert, the last editor of the reference book Who's Who in the Theatre, is now Consultant Editor of Theatre Record, the ongoing critical history of the British stage, which he edited and published from 1981 to 2003. From 1984-91 he edited the technical theatre journal Sightline. He has written for theatre journals world wide, including regular columns for The Stage and Lighting and Sound International. President 2001-2008 of IATC, he is now an Honorary President. He is a board member of the Europe Theatre Prize, a Vice President (and former Chairman) of the Society for Theatre Research in London, and a Trustee of the UK Critics' Circle. He has taught and lectured on criticism in many countries of the world, both as Director of Seminars for IATC and as a visiting professor of several US universities..
Critic & Scholar
(Quebec, Canada)
Michel Vaïs was born in Tunisia, but he is living in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) since the age of 12. He became an actor at 17, in an avant-garde theatre company, then a director and a playwright, before getting degrees in three universities and teaching for 12 years. He received his Bachelor from Université de Montréal, Master of Arts from McGill University, and Doctorate in Theatre Studies from Université de Paris 8. He then became a broadcaster for Chaîne culturelle de Radio-Canada and is editor at Revue de théâtre Jeu since its foundation in 1976 (and now senior editor). He presided the Quebec Association of Theatre Critics and joined the International Association of Theatre Critics in 1992. He became treasurer, then vice-president, and, since 1998, he is Secretary General of the IATC, serving with five presidents. He is also the French language editor for the IATC journal Critical Stages/Scènes critiques.
Academic & Critic
(England/Angleterre)
Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is an invited theatre critic at the annual Golden Mask National Theatre Award and Festival in Moscow, among other festivals. She is the co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly published by Cambridge University Press, an editor of Critical Stages, and on the editorial boards of several international journals, including Polish Theatre Perspectives. Shevtsova works closely with directors and theatre companies, and her numerous publications include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004), Robert Wilson (2007) and Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009), which also reflects her theatre-criticism and theoretical concerns.
Academic & Critic
(France)
Patrice Pavis was professor of theatre studies at the University of Paris (1976-2007) and the University of Kent at Canterbury. Educated in the Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud (1968-1972), where he studied German and French literature, He has published a Dictionary of theatre (translated into thirty languages), and books on Performance analysis, Contemporary French dramatists and Contemporary mise en scène. He is an Honorary Fellow at the University of London (Queen Mary) and Honoris Causa Doctor at the University of Bratislava, and of Sofia. In 2011 and 2012, he was a visiting professor at the Korea National University of the Arts, Seoul. His most recent publication in English are: The Routledge Dictionary of Performance and Contemporary Theatre (2016), Performing Korea (Palgrave, 2017), Lets embrace in the Cherry Orchard (2014), A Visit to the Hospital (2017).
Director, Critic, Scholar
(USA/États-Unis)
Lissa Tyler Renaud M.F.A. Directing; Ph.D. Theatre History/Criticism, summa cum laude, U.C. Berkeley. Director of Oakland's influential InterArts Training for the actor-scholar; lifelong actress, director, dramaturg, and sought-after recitalist. As visiting professor, master teacher, and speaker, she has taught, lectured and published widely on acting, directing, voice, theatre criticism and the early European avant-garde, throughout the U.S., at major theatre institutions of Asia, and in England, Mexico, Russia and Sweden. Awards include Ford Foundation and National Science Council grants. Book publications include The Politics of American Actor Training (Routledge) and an invited chapter in the Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky. Writer and theatre critic for Scene4 international arts and culture magazine (editor, "Kandinsky Anew" theatre series). Founding editor (English) of Critical Stages; Renaud remains a contributing critic and board member. Editor for the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, China; editor of Selected Plays of Stan Lai (3 vols.), forthcoming, University of Michigan Press.
Academic & Critic
(Serbia/Serbie)
Ivan Medenica (Belgrade, Serbia), works at the FDA as an Associate Professor, teaching The History of World Drama and Theatre, and holds the position of the Head of the Department for Theory and History. He is an active theater critic and has received five times the national award for the best theatre criticism. He was the artistic director of Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad, the leading national theater festival in Serbia (2003-2007), to which he brought some important structural changes, especially in the domain of internationalization. From 2001 to 2012, Medenica was one of the main editors of the prestigious journal Teatron. He is a member of the International Association of Theater Critics’ Executive Committee and the Director of its international conferences. He is also member of the editorial board of Critical Stages, the web journal of the Association, and as of October 2015, the artistic director of Bitef Festival (Belgrade).
Academic & Playwright
(Nigeria)
Femi Osofisan is one of Africa’s foremost dramatists as well as a Professor Emeritus at the University of Ibadan. A winner of numerous international prizes including the International Association of Theatre Critics’ Thalia Prize, Osofisan has taught and lectured across Africa as well as in North America, Europe and Asia. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Critical Stages.
Academic & Critic
(S. Korea/Corée du Sud)
Yun-Cheol Kim obtained his Ph.D. from BYU with his dissertation on contemporary American Drama. He served as President of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) from 2008 till 2014. During his presidency, he launched IATC’s journal Critical Stages, in 2009. Now, he is an honorary president of the association. He served as artistic director of the National Theatre Company of Korea for four years, from the beginning of 2014 till the end of 2017. He retired from the School of Drama, Korean National University of the Arts in 2015, where he taught for twenty years, and, now, is its honorary professor. He received the Cultural Order from the Korean government in 2008. Two-time winner of the “Critic of the Year Award,” he has published twelve books, two of which are anthologies of theatre reviews.
Critic
(France)
Jean-Pierre Han : Journalist and theatre critic. Founding editor of the journal Frictions, théâtres-écritures. Editor-in -chief of Lettres françaises. Collaborator to numerous French and foreign publications (Cripure, Profession politique, le Monde de l'Education, Europe, Théâtre/Public, Scènes, Témoignage chrétien, ADE, Artista Unidos, among others). He has taught for fifteen years at the University of Paris III-Sorbonne nouvelle's Institut d'études théâtrales, and at Paris X. Also : Artistic advisor of the Siwa platform (artistic laboratory of contemporary arab world). Former member of the DRAC Ile-de-France Commission (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles), of the Commission d’aide à la création of the Ministry of Culture and of the Centre national du livre (theatre section). Past President of the French section « Syndicat professionnel de la critique de théâtre, musique et danse. » Vice-president of the AICT, and director of the workshops for young critics. His last book, 30 editos +1, won the prize of the best book about the theatre in 2019/2020.
Academic & Critic
(Germany/Allemagne)
Thomas Irmer is a Berlin-based scholar and critic regularly contributing to Theater der Zeit, Theater heute and Shakespeare (Norway). He has also worked for various international festivals, e.g. 2003-2006 as dramaturge for spielzeit europa / Berliner Festspiele. His recent books include Andrzej Wirth: Flucht nach vorn. Erzählte Autobiographie und Materialien (2013) and Maria Steinfeldt Das Bild des Theaters (2015). Recent academic research covered the internationalization of German theatre, a subject he taught at the University of Osnabrück 2014/15. He also directed, in 2004, the prize-winning documentary film, The Staged Republic: Theatre in the GDR.
Critic
(Finland/Finlande)
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 1993, he has written and directed several radio plays for YLE the Finnish Broadcasting Company. His latest stage play, Ta mig till er ledare (“Take me to your leader,” 2016), ran at Lilla teatern in Helsinki.
Academic & Critic
(Japan/Japon)
Manabu Noda is Professor at Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan. As a theatre critic and researcher, he has written on British and Japanese theatre, acting and theatre history. He is currently editor in chief of the Theatre Arts (IATC Japan) and on the editorial board of Critical Stages (IATC). His English publications include “Immersion as the Inscription of Theatre-Maker’s Reading: Complicite, The Encounter,” in Contemporary Drama and Performative Space: From Playwriting to Immersive Theatre (2018); “Trying to Give Shape to an Unending End: Post-3/11 Theatre in Tokyo,” Critical Stages 6 (2012); “From Articulation to Synthesis: Stage Passions from the Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries in England,” in Aufführungsdiskurse im 18. Jahrhundert (2011); and “The Body Ill at Ease in Post-War Japanese Theatre,” New Theatre Quarterly, 23:3 (2007).
Academic & Critic
(Romania/Roumanie)
Ludmila Patlanjoglu is theatre critic and historian, as well as University Professor and Head of the Theatre Science Department at the “I. L. Caragiale” National University of Drama and Film Arts in Bucharest, Romania. She was President of IATC Romanian Section (1999-2008) and Member of IATC’s Executive Committee (2001-2007). She is currently honorary member of the IATC Romanian Section board (2008 to present) and a member of the Romanian Theatre Artists’ Association (UNITER). She directed the 2002 and 2003 editions of the “I. L. Caragiale” National Theatre Festival in Romania and the 21st Congress of IATC organized in Bucharest (November 2003). She launched the IATC’s THALIA Prize (whose trophy was designed by Dragos Buhagiar) and is a member of the editorial board of Critical Stages, the web journal of IATC.
Academic & Critic
(Canada/Russia/Russie)
Yana Meerzon is Professor at the University of Ottawa and President of Canadian Association for Theatre Research. Trained as a professional theatre critic in Moscow, Russia (GITIS), she also holds a PHD from University of Toronto, Canada. Yana is the author of three books, with the latest volume Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism published by Palgrave in August 2020. She co-edited seven collections of articles, including Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture with David Dean and Daniel McNeil (Palgrave 2020). Her current research project is entitled “Between Migration and Neo-Nationalism(s): Performing the European Nation -- Playing a Foreigner”; and it has been funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Yana is the editor of the “Essays Section” of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques.
Critic
(Poland/Pologne)
Tomasz Miłkowski (1947, Warsaw, Poland), PhD, Polish philology, University of Warsaw. Journalist, literary and theatre critic, author of a lot of books, essays and reviews. Editor-in-chief of the Internet theatrical quarterly Yorick (www.aict.art.pl).
Critic
(Argentina/Argentine)
Halima Tahan Ferreyra is a Doctor in Modern Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, where she has also worked as a teacher. She has experience as a cultural journalist and was part of the theater group of the Instituto Goethe as a dramaturgin and of the Commission that promoted the Latin American Theater Festivals. She wrote over a hundred articles which were published in Argentina and abroad. She is member of the AICT / UNESCO, director of publishing company Ediciones Artes del Sur and is currently living in Buenos Aires.
Academic & Critic
(Quebec, Canada)
Hervé Guay is a full-professor in the Department of Letters and Social Communication at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. His research interests include Quebec cultural history, discourses on theatre, performance aesthetics, digital in the living arts and spectating. President of the Société Québécoise d’études théâtrales from 2011 to 2015 and codirector of Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoises from 2019 to 2021, he founded the Laboratoire de recherche sur les publics de la culture in 2015 and he serves as the Editor of the journal Tangence since 2012.
Academic & Critic
(England/Angleterre)
Diana Damian Martin is a writer and academic working at the intersection between writing, politics and performance. She is a Senior Lecturer in Performance Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where is currently leading the BA (Hons) Contemporary Performance Practice-Performance Arts course. She is editor of [Margins] section of Performance Philosophy Journal, part of Performance Studies International’s Future Advisory Board and co-convenes the working group Documenting Performance for the Theatre and Performance Research Association.
Academic & Critic
(Caribbean/des Caraïbes)
Selim Lander (born in France) is a theatre and art critic. Ηis articles have appeared in the review Recherches en Esthétique, the magazines Esprit, Antilla and the web-journal mondesfrancophones.com, among others. He is university professor (emeritus--Μichel Herland) of economics, author of books and articles on economics, the history of ideas and the theories of social justice. He is also the author of two novels and two collections of poems. He lives most of the time in Martinique (French West Indies--Αntilles françaises).
Academic and playwright
(IRAN/USA/États-Unis)
Katayoun Salmasi is an Iranian-American critic, playwright, dramaturge, and director living in the United States. Before moving to the U.S. in 2012, Salmasi taught for eleven years as a lecturer at Azad University of Tehran and Art University of Tehran. In addition to her teaching duties, Salmasi translated works by Edward Albee, August Strindberg, Billy Wilder, Wendy Wasserstein, and Joyce Carol Oates for the Iranian stage. As a director, she has staged nine of her own plays as well as works by Wasserstein, Chekhov and Euripides, among others. Her work as a cultural critic has appeared in many publications, including Critical Stages. She is a former vice president of the Iran Theatre Critics Association. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
