Dominika Laster, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Lecturer in Theater Studies

dominika.laster@yale.edu

Dominika Laster is the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) and Lecturer in the Theater Studies Program at Yale University.  She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY) from 2011 to 2013.

Her areas of research include:  20th century  theatre, Eastern European theatre, intercultural performance, nonwestern theatre, postcolonial studies, immigration, memory and trauma studies, abjection, and the politics of performance.  In addition to her scholarly research, Laster has worked as a director and performer in work ranging from pantomime to opera.

Dominika Laster is a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award from Performance Studies international for her research examining Islamic practices of witnessing within the context of post-9/11 detentions and deportations.  Laster’s doctoral dissertation, a critical analysis of key aspects of performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski’s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, earned her the Monroe Lippman Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation.

In 2009, Laster served as the Associate Curator of Tracing Grotowski’s Path:  Year of Grotowski in New York.  Laster has published articles in Performance Research, Slavic and Eastern European Performance, New Theatre Quarterly and TDR.  Her books A Bridge Made of Memory:  Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland (Editor) are forthcoming from Seagull Press, distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press.