Elizabeth Hunter is a critical theorist and digital maker exploring the future of live performance and emergent technologies. Her research asks what happens when we inhabit the space of a famous story, and the story seeps into ours.
Elizabeth Hunter is Assistant Professor in Drama and Director of the Fabula(b) Theatre + New Media Lab in the Performing Arts Department at WashU. Her current book project, In the Story: Enactive Spectatorship from Amphitheatre to Augmented Reality, maps a new critical model of audience participation in canonical dramas staged with immersive technologies ranging from replica early modern practices to spatial computing. The theoretical side of Professor Hunter’s research complements her practice-led work as the Director of Fabula(b), where she leads an interdisciplinary team of student researchers to create digital adaptations of canonical dramas and other famous stories as a mode of historiographic and dramaturgical analysis.
Her digital projects have been supported by Microsoft, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, and her scholarship has been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Theatre Topics and the edited book Research Methods in the Digital Humanities.
Before joining Washington University, Professor Hunter was Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at San Francisco State University. She has also been head of development for an independent film company in New York City and the founding artistic director of an immersive Shakespeare company in a restored blast furnace in Birmingham, Alabama.