Dr Bryony White Assistant Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies Director of Graduate Studies (Department of Theatre and Performance Studies) Editor, Studies in Theatre and Performance bryony.white@warwick.ac.uk  Office Hours (24/25): TBC

About:

I specialise in performance and visual culture from 1960 to the present, with research and teaching interests in performance studies, art history, feminist and queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies. More broadly, I am interested in how art and performance is enmeshed in the world, and what material conditions make it possible. My forthcoming monograph Legal Aesthetics: The Making of Sexual Intimacy in Performance explores how certain bodies become subject to the law, and how art and performance might enable some artists to reframe, redress and sometimes unsettle the reach of the law over themselves and their bodies. In particular, my monograph investigates the visual and formal strategies that artists use to theorise how the law and legal structures regulate the bodies and intimacies of queer, gendered, racialised and minoritarian subjects, primarily in North America from 1960 to the present. My next research project is interested in the relationship between sexuality and political economy. In particular, through art and performance, I explore what they might tell us about the visibility and invisibility of so-called ‘deviant’ sexualities and sex practices, sexual repression and regulation, and how this is invoked at certain historical and economic junctures. In doing so, I seek to complicate the linear teleology of gay liberation in the US and, instead, explore the makings of sexuality through capitalism. Alongside my academic research, I am interesting in writing that connects with broader publics, and I am currently writing a non-fiction book entitled Dirty Queers , which explores the relationship between sexuality, filth and art, and is forthcoming from Serpent's Tail (Profile Books) in 2026.

I have held positions in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, where I worked on the AHRC-funded project ‘Live Art in Scotland’. I have also taught in the Drama department at Queen Mary University of London, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and in the English department at King’s College London, where I received my PhD in 2020, and an Elsevier Outstanding Thesis Prize in 2021. In 2019, I was a Visiting International Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and have collaborated with cultural institutions and galleries such as Tate, the Women of the World Foundation, Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts and London’s Institute of Contemporary Art to run public programmes and seminar series for artists and the general public. I regularly write reviews and essays about art and culture for publications such as frieze, ArtReview, the Times Literary Supplement, and LA Review of Books, and in 2020, I wrote a monthly column for Elephant magazine about sex and desire. In 2023, I was the winner of the Early Career Researcher Prize from the Theatre and Performance Research Association for my article, 'Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Gendered and Racialized in Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene’ for Art Journal. I am a member of Performance Studies International, the Association for Art History and Historical Materialism.

• Gender and sexuality in contemporary art and performance
• Contemporary queer and trans visual cultures
• Queer and feminist theory
• The body and embodiment in art and performance
• Archives, oral history and historiography of art and performance
• Performance and the law
• Violence, endurance, and pain in performance
• The politics and ethics of theatre and performance practices
• Histories of live art in the UK
• Experimental and performative writing

Books

• (In preparation) Legal Aesthetics: The Making of Sexual Intimacy in Performance
• (Forthcoming 2026) Dirty Queers: A History of Art and Filth (Serpent's Tail)

Journal Articles

• White, Bryony, ‘Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Gendered and Racialized in Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene’, Art Journal, 82.2 (2023) 68–81.
• White, Bryony, ‘The Star of the Show: Trademark, Theatricality and “The Grandmother of Performance Art”’, Performance Research, 24.4 (2019), 53–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2019.1641324

Reviews

• White, Bryony, ‘Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation: Displayed & Performed by Georgina Guy (review)’, Theatre Journal, 69.3 (2017), 436–437. https://doi:10.1353/tj.2017.0057

Selected Journalism

• White, Bryony, ‘Sharon Hayes and Speaking Through Love’, (essay), Tate Etc, Issue 55, Summer 2022.
• White, Bryony, ‘Come as Softy’, monthly column for online and print magazine Elephant on visual art and pleasure, September 2020–December 2021.
• White, Bryony, ‘Cleaning Up Their Act: Are Beauty Products Sanitising Radical Art?’ (essay), Elephant, 20^th August 2021.
• White, Bryony, ‘The Untold Queer History of California’ (exhibition review), frieze, 24^th June 2019.
• White, Bryony, ‘Performance Anxiety’ (essay), Art Monthly, Issue 426, May 2019.
• White, Bryony, ‘Queering the Rural’ (essay), Hazlitt, July 26^th
• White, Bryony, ‘Cloud with its Shadow: Marina Abramovic’s Walk Through Walls’, (book review), Los Angeles Review of Books, 7^th December 2016.

Editorship

• I am currently editor for the peer-reviewed journal, Studies in Theatre and Performance (2022—present)
• White, Bryony and Greer, Stephen (eds), Now / Not Now (Live Art in Scotland, University of Glasgow, June 2022)
• White, Bryony and Greer, Steve, Live Art Scotland Practitioner Directory, Finding Aid (Live Art in Scotland, University of Glasgow, February 2022) https://doi.org/pubs.265874
• 2017–2021: White, Bryony and Jones, Eleanor, close, an online newsletter featuring writing from Helen Charman, Nina Mingya Powles, Lola Olufemi, Nisha Ramayya, Jesse Darling and Bridget Minamore. With an audience of over 2,500 people and features in Vice and the New Statesman, the project successfully engaged public audiences.