Fifty Key Performance Artists

Fifty Key Performance Artists is a critical introduction to some of the most influential and innovative performance artists from the emergence of the genre post-World War II to the present, whose work has largely been underrecognized and underacknowledged within an English-language context.

The collection compiles an international and innovative index of artists who, primarily through body art and live performance, have shaped the possibilities of the field. It includes artists whose now-canonical work defined performance art through feminist body art, interventionist public art, and durational performance, as well as new artists who are redefining the genre through emerging technologies and an explicit alignment with social activism. Artists indexed include Arahmaiani, Rebecca Belmore, Rocío Boliver, Lorenza Böttner, Disabled Avant-Garde, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi aka crazinisT artist, Emily Jacir, Lee Wen, Lorraine O’Grady, Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Tracey Rose, Seiji Shimoda, Leafā Wilson aka Olga Krause and Marcía X. Each entry considers the artist’s body of work in its historical, cultural, and political context, and a map at the end provides additional artists whose work is artistically and historically relational to those included.

This is an essential survey of performance art for scholars and students in visual, theatre, and performance studies and for those interested in matters of the body in performance, reception theory, and live art.

T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, University of Toronto, Canada. Her first book, Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture after September 11 (Routledge, 2015), investigates the changing relationship between world events and their subsequent documentation in mainstream and social media. Her recent projects explore the potential of performance to enact radical care. She has published articles and reviews in journals including TDR, Performance Research, and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, among others, and dramaturged experimental music-theatre and theatre productions in Canada, Mexico, and the US.

Adriana Disman, PhD, is a performance artist and writer. Disman’s performance has been presented internationally since 2010 and they have curated performance art events and residencies in Toronto, Montreal, New York City, London, and Berlin. Their writing on performance―particularly that which is perceived as “self-harming”―appears in Performance Research, C Magazine, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, and More Caught in the Act, among others. Disman holds a PhD in Drama from Queen Mary University of London, UK, and was awarded the 2025 CATR Richard Plant Award and the 2018 GOG Art Writing Award.