Elizabeth Hunter, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts

Elizabeth Hunter

Assistant Professor of Drama
Ph.D. and M.A., Theatre and Drama, Northwestern University
M.F.A., Dramaturgy, Columbia University School of the Arts
B.A., English and Psychology, University of Michigan
research interests:
  • Spatial Computing
  • Immersive Theatre
  • Audience Participation
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contact info:

mailing address:

  • Washington University
    MSC-1108-193-312
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

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 our own. 

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 first monograph, Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance (University of Michigan Press 2025), offers a new paradigm for understanding how audiences participate in immersive theater, from physical spaces like the Globe in London to digital spaces like social virtual reality. She is currently working on her next book project, which mounts the first scholarly analysis of digital resurrection—the use of AI and spatial computing to bring back the dead—as performance. Titled, “Death Is Obsolete: Staging Resurrection in the Age of AI,” this project explores how a critical lens of performance theory can illuminate the user roles and production choices inherent in digitally resurrecting all manner of bodies, from the corporeal to the architectural.

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 to create digital adaptations of canonical dramas and other famous stories as a mode of historiographic and dramaturgical analysis. The lab’s current project, “VISIBLE: Resurrecting Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s Moving Panorama, ‘Mirror of Slavery,’” is currently in prototyping.

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. With Scott Magelssen, she is co-editor of Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance (University of Michigan Press 2025), the first edited collection from a university press dedicated to contemporary immersive theatre and performance.

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.

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Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance

Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance

By Elizabeth Hunter

Acting the Part offers a paradigm for understanding how audiences participate in immersive theater, from physical spaces like the Globe in London to digital spaces like social virtual reality. Reading across twenty-first century productions of ancient Greek tragedies and William Shakespeare’s plays, E. B. Hunter proposes the concept of “enactivity” to describe the positionality audiences inhabit when their participation is critical to the narrative but cannot alter its intended course. This positionality is that of the archetype, the enactment of which is shaped by four production conditions: a historically resonant site, a canonical source, an immersive space, and a production-specific economy that incentivizes some behaviors and discourages others. At the heart of Acting the Part is a framework for identifying how a production’s management of these conditions gives rise to a range of archetypes, such as worshiper, sleuth, cinematographer, and others. Against the backdrop of an ever-increasing push for audience participation, Acting the Part sheds new light on the many ways in which productions shape that participation in real time.

Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance

Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance

Edited By Elizabeth Hunter & Scott Magelssen

Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays.

Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms; Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.