• Katie Schaag
• Assistant Professor of Theatre & Performance
• Spelman College

Katie Schaag is an Assistant Professor of Theatre & Performance at Spelman College, where she teaches performance studies, visual cultures, writing for performance, and other courses at the intersection of theatre, art, literature, and digital media. She earned her PhD in English Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison with a specialization in Performance Studies and Visual Cultures and a minor in Fine Art and Creative Writing. As a scholar and artist, she researches plasticity, performativity, digital poetics, queer femme aesthetics, and minoritarian conceptualisms. Her scholarly writing is published in Performance Research, Modern Drama, and Inter Views in Performance Philosophy, and her public essays appear in Edge Effects, Yes Femmes, and elsewhere. She is the author of the feminist erasure poetry chapbook The Infinite Woman (Greying Ghost 2021) and the interactive web app The Infinite Woman (2019). Her first scholarly book project, “Conceptual Theatre,” theorizes minoritarian avant-garde closet drama and conceptual art. Her second project, “American Plasticity,” theorizes plastic aesthetics through the lenses of feminist materialisms and queer ecologies. In her artistic practice, she makes work for the page, stage, gallery, screen, and social context. As a solo artist, she creates site-specific performances and immersive multimedia installations. With her artistic partnership SALYER + SCHAAG, she creates durational relational aesthetics projects. She co-founded the Mellon Art + Scholarship Workshop and the Madison Performance Philosophy Collective. She has presented her research at international conferences including Performance Studies International, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, and International Federation for Theatre Research.

Speaking In:

• Subversions and Interventions