Sarah Bay-Cheng

Sarah Bay-Cheng, PhD is Professor of Emerging Technologies in Theatre and Performance and the Helen and Paul Phelan Chair in Drama at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Toronto. A former Fulbright Scholar at Utrecht University, her research explores the intersections of theatre, performance, and digital technologies, examining how historical practices in media inform contemporary performance and culture. She has published four books, including Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (co-authored, University of Michigan, 2015) and Mapping Intermediality in Performance (co-edited, University of Amsterdam Press, 2010). She edited the book series, Avant-Gardes in Performance and has published over 75 essays, chapters and reviews.

Her current research projects include Digital Historiography and Performance: Introductions & Provocations (University of Michigan Press), “AI in Performance-making: New Frontiers in the Humanities” Contemporary Theatre Review, co-edited with Liam Jarvis and Aneta Mancewicz, and new work on data in creating impact frameworks for arts organizations and researchers. 

Previously, Bay-Cheng served as the Dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design and as Department Chair of Theatre and Dance at Bowdoin College. In 2012, she founded the Technē Institute for Arts and Emerging Technologies, and graduate programs in Theatre and Performance at the University at Buffalo. She is a founding co-host for On TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies Podcast, and can be heard there occasionally. 

Beyond scholarship, Bay-Cheng has worked as a director and dramaturg with a focus on intermedial collaborations and a fondness for puppetry. 

Selected Works

Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field
Digital Historiography and Performance
Theatre is Media: Some Principles for a Digital Historiography of Performance
Mapping Intermediality in Performance
Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre

Publications

Party Like It’s 1999: From Digitalization to Datafication (2024)
Digital Performance and Its Discontents (or, Problems of Presence in Pandemic Performance) (2023)
The Afterlife of Modernist Acting (2019)