Una Chaudhuri

Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University. Her publications include No Man’s Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet’s Drama, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal, and Land/Scape/Theater (co-edited Elinor Fuchs). Chaudhuri is a pioneer in the field of “eco-theatre”— plays and performances that engage with the subjects of ecology and environment—and helped to launch that field when she guest-edited a special issue of Yale’s Theater journal in 1994. Her introduction to that issue, entitled “’There must be a lot of fish in that lake’ Theorizing a Theatre Ecology,” is widely credited as a seminal contribution to the field. Chaudhuri was also among the first scholars of drama and theatre to engage with another rapidly expanding new inter-disciplinary field, Animal Studies, and guested-edited a special issue of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, on “Animals and Performance.” In 2014, she published books in both these fields: an Animal Studies book entitled Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (co-edited with Holly Hughes) and an ecocriticism book entitled The Ecocide Project: Research Theatre and Climate Change (co-authored with Shonni Enelow). Her monograph, The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooësis and Performance , was published in 2017 by Routledge Press. Professor Chaudhuri participates in collaborative creative projects, including the multi-platform intervention entitled Dear Climate, which has been presented in New York, Santa Barbara, Troy, Dublin, Abu Dhabi, and the Netherlands. She is a founding member of CLIMATE LENS. She chairs the panel of judges for the Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre, and she has been a judge of the Obie and the Alpert Awards and a voting member of the American Theatre Wing, which awards Broadway’s Tony Awards.