T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko

T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko, PhD, is Associate Professor in Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. Formerly a classically trained double bassist, she has sustained her interest in contemporary classical music while also expanding her research to experimental and avant-garde performance, experimental music-theatre, feminist ethics of care, and mothering studies. Her first book, Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture after September 11 (Routledge, 2015) engages the relationship between event and its subsequent documentation in mainstream, alternative, and social media. She has also coedited special issues of TDR, with Mariellen R. Sandford, on contemporary avant-garde performance; CTR, with Didier Morelli and Isabelle Stowell-Kaplan, on the relationships between art, activism, and commodity culture; and Performance Matters’ Forum Section, with Seika Boye, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, and Evadne Kelly, on the inter- and transdisciplinary fields of dance and dance studies through their history and historiography, archive, and future. Her current book, 50 Key Performance Artists (Routledge, 2026), coedited with Adriana Disman, PhD, brings together entries on fifty performance artists from six continents, many of whom are underrecognized within an English-language canon.

She has published articles in journals including Performance Research, International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, Theatre Research in Canada (TRiC), Canadian Theatre Research (CTR), Theatre Journal, and The Drama Review (TDR), where she was also Managing Editor and Critical Acts Editor. She has also published chapters in Rethinking Motherhood in the Twenty-first Century (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026), Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), Women in Popular Culture in Canada (Women’s Press/Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2020), Iconoclasm: The Breaking and Making of Images (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), and Canadian Performance History and Historiographies (Playwrights Canada Press, 2017). She maintains an active creative practice as a dramaturge, having worked with ensembles including the International Contemporary Ensemble and Music in the Barns.

Born and raised in Appalachia, Nikki lived in New York for ten years before moving to Toronto for another ten years. Craving the stars again, she now lives in Port Hope, Ontario, with her partner, three children, and several furred and scaled housemates.