About the Speakers

• Leon J. Hilton

  Leon J. Hilton is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University and Associate Curator at the Performance Art Museum (PAM). He is helping lead PAM’s two-year initiative examining the history and legacy of High Performance, the artist-run magazine published from 1978 to 1997 that became the first international magazine devoted exclusively to performance art. His current curatorial and scholarly work explores genealogies of risk, endurance, and duration in performance. Hilton is the author of Counter-Cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (University of Minnesota Press) and was lead curator of Queer Durations, a three-day convening held at Brown in 2024 focused on duration in queer and trans performance, visual, and media art. His writing has appeared in Art in America, GLQ, Third Text, Social Text, and TDR/The Drama Review, among other publications.

• Lin Hixson

  Lin Hixson co-founded Every house has a door in 2008, the Chicago-based performance company that she directs. She was director of the performance group Goat Island (1987–2009). Every house has a door has presented both nationally and internationally including Prague, Helsinki, Glasgow, London, New York, Austin, and Chicago. She has received awards from the United States Artists, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Driehaus Foundation, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Residencies have included The Bellagio Center, MANCC, and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Her writing has been published in the journals Poetry, Performance Research, and Parallax, as well as the anthologies The Creative Critic – Writing as/about Practice and The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader. She is Professor Emerita of Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts.

• Vanessa Damilola Macaulay

  Vanessa Damilola Macaulay is an Assistant Professor in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her scholarship and practice together foreground Black feminist theory as both a mode of critique and a method of making. Macaulay’s artistic practice moves fluidly between autobiographical traces and archival excavation, drawing on performance as both method and site for imagining otherwise. Macaulay’s work has been presented at The Getty (Los Angeles), International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), the Momentary (Arkansas), Buzzcut (Scotland), Driftwood Studios (South Africa), and The Yard (London), among other venues.

• Peter Taub

  Peter Taub developed and produced artist-centered projects in Chicago for about 35 years. He was the founding director of the performing arts program at MCA Chicago from 1996 to 2016, helping to establish MCA as a leading presenter of multidisciplinary artists working in Chicago, the US, and internationally. As a curator and arts manager, he placed emphasis on supporting artists and their work through commissions, creative residencies, and consortium initiatives. For 10 years prior he led Randolph Street Gallery, a dynamic artist-run center with thematic exhibitions, performances, installations, public art, grants to artists, and P-Form performance art magazine. He has also curated for Chicago and international festivals, and cofounded Chicago Dancemakers Forum.