Kimberly Jannarone studies avant-garde art and thought across genres, grounded in performance. A central focus of her work is the relationship between the audience and the performer. As a director and dramaturge herself, studying audience histories and theories of performance fuels her practical work. In each she attempts to uncover the politics and the aesthetics of theorizing bodies together in space. In fall 2009, Jannarone was a Camargo Fellow in residence in Cassis, France, working on her second book, The Crowd in the Theater, which ties together histories of people’s theaters and crowd theory.

Her first book, Artaud and His Doubles, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in 2010. In it, Jannarone brings the theatrical ideas of Antonin Artaud to new light by situating him in the context of European intellectual and political history. Her talk, “Crowds, Cruelty, Communion,” draws from this research, taking a look at Artaud’s ideal audience alongside a surprising group of his contemporaries in interwar Europe.

Jannarone is Associate Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her BA in English and Theater from Emory University and her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama. Her essays on Artaud, Alfred Jarry, and Surrealism have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, French Forum, New Theatre Quarterly, and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in the World’s Most Popular Parlor Game (University of Nebraska Press).