About the Book
Fifty Key Performance Artists is a critical introduction to some of the most influential and innovative performance artists from the emergence of the genre post-World War II to the present, whose work has largely been underrecognized and underacknowledged within an English-language context.
The collection compiles an international and innovative index of artists who, primarily through body art and live performance, define the field. It includes artists whose now-canonical work defined performance art through feminist body art, interventionist public art, and durational performance, as well as new artists who are redefining the genre through emerging technologies and an explicit alignment with social activism. Artists indexed include Arahmaiani, Rebecca Belmore, Rocío Boliver, Lorenza Böttner, Disabled Avant-Garde, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi aka crazinisT artist, Emily Jacir, Lee Wen, Lorraine O’Grady, Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Tracey Rose, Seiji Shimoda, Leafā Wilson aka Olga Krause and Marcía X. Each entry considers the artist’s body of work in its historical, cultural, and political context, and a map at the end provides additional artists whose work is artistically and historically relational to those included.
This is an essential survey of performance art for scholars and students in visual, theatre, and performance studies and for those interested in matters of the body in performance, reception theory, and live art.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Chumpon Apisuk
2. Arahmaiani
3. Jelili Atiku
4. Aye Ko
5. Adina Bar-On
6. Rebecca Belmore
7. Rocío Boliver
8. Lorenza Böttner
9. Leigh Bowery
10. Tania Bruguera
11. Chen Jin
12. Nikhil Chopra
13. Vaginal Davis
14. Vlasta Delimar
15. Manmeet Devgun
16. Disabled Avant-Garde
17. Esther Ferrer
18. Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi aka crazinisT artist
19. Regina José Galindo
20. Tara and Razieh Goudarzi
21. Kamil Guenatri
22. He Yunchang
23. Adrian Howells
24. Tari Ito
25. Emily Jacir
26. Kollektivnye Deistviya / Collective Actions
27. Lee Wen
28. Alastair MacLennan
29. Tanya Mars
30. Karel Miler
31. Şükran Moral
32. Eli Neira
33. Boris Nieslony
34. Lorraine O’Grady
35. Clifford Owens
36. Clemente Padín
37. Graciela Ovejero Postigo
38. Ashmina Ranjit
39. Rosanna Raymond
40. Tracey Rose
41. Rosemberg Sandoval
42. Hassan Sharif
43. Seiji Shimoda
44. Latai Taumoepeau
45. Sylvie Tourangeau
46. Voina
47. Zbigniew Warpechowski
48. Leafā Wilson aka Olga Krause
49. Watan Wuma
50. Márcia X
About the Author :
T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, University of Toronto, Canada. Her first book, Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture after September 11 (Routledge, 2015), investigates the changing relationship between world events and their subsequent documentation in mainstream and social media. Her recent projects explore the potential of performance to enact radical care. She has published articles and reviews in journals including TDR, Performance Research, and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, among others, and dramaturged experimental music-theatre and theatre productions in Canada, Mexico, and the US.
Adriana Disman, PhD, is a performance artist and writer. Disman’s performance has been presented internationally since 2010 and they have curated performance art events and residencies in Toronto, Montreal, New York City, London, and Berlin. Their writing on performance—particularly that which is perceived as “self-harming”—appears in Performance Research, C Magazine, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, and More Caught in the Act, among others. Disman holds a PhD in Drama from Queen Mary University of London, UK, and was awarded the 2025 CATR Richard Plant Award and the 2018 GOG Art Writing Award. They are also a novelist.
Review :
"Fifty Key Performance Artists brings to the fore influential and often overlooked artists from around the world. Clear, engaging, comprehensive, and thoughtfully organised, this book will be a vital resource for students, scholars, and anyone interested in how performance art shapes cultures, identities, and activisms, in the past and in the present."
Dominic Johnson, author of Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s
