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Vanessa Damilola Macaulay

Assistant Professor

Contact

Bio

Vanessa Macaulay is an artist-scholar whose work develops Black feminist approaches to performance through practice and theory. Her research demonstrates how the histories and material realities of Black women’s bodies call for methods that exceed conventional artistic and academic frameworks. She creates new pathways for thinking about experimental forms of making, the body as a site of knowledge and resistance, and the cultural narratives that shape Black life.

Since 2016, Macaulay has created and toured solo performances across the UK, Europe and  South Africa with presentations at institutions including Derby Theatre, The Yard Theatre, and Camden People’s Theatre, and at festivals such as Plymouth Fringe, Croydonites, Glasgow Buzzcut, and Talawa Firsts. Working across live performance, movement, video, duration, and objects, her practice often begins from autobiographical traces and expands outward to interrogate Black British experience.

Macaulay’s scholarship and practice together foreground Black feminist theory as both a mode of critique and a method of making. In doing so, she offers a model of research that is as critically incisive as it is artistically inventive.

BA (hons), 2014, University of Lincoln, UK; MA, 2016, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London UK; PhD, 2022, Queen Mary University of London, UK. Performances: The Yard, London UK; Derby Theatre, UK; Buzzcut Glasgow; Croydonites; Camden Peoples Theatre; Plymouth Theatre; Chishenhale Dance Space; Talawa. Publications: Contemporary Theatre Review, Interventions, Performance Research Journal, Cambridge Companion.

Publications

Peer Reviewed Articles

2025 [Forthcoming], ‘Crimes Against the Breath,’ Performance Research Journal; 2024, ‘No Safe Place, Black Women, State Violence and Cultural Production’, Feminist Theory Journal 0(0); 2023, ‘Breathing Space: The Invitation to Exist and Breath’, Performance Research Journal 27(6–7), 154–162; 2022, ‘Blackness and Self-Imaging: Lorraine O’Grady’s Performance as Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire’, Contemporary Theatre Review. 32(1), 4–20. 

Work

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

VIRAL interrogates the unstable, hyper-mediated terrain of contemporary performance in the age of digital networks. This three-week lab asks: How do identity, presence, and agency mutate when performance circulates online, when bodies are cloned, mirrored, or anonymised? How do memes, catfishing, comment sections, and livestreams become tools, scores, and performance systems? Through embodied experimentation, live media mixing, and critical reflection, students will probe virality as an aesthetic, political, and ethical practice.

Students will encounter a wide range of material from playtexts such as Jasmine Lee-Jones¿ seven methods of killing kylie jenner (2019) & Caryl Churchill¿s Love and information (2012). As well as artists work including Jacolby Satterwhite, Wu Tsang and Amalia Ulman. These works will be contextualised through texts such as Liveness and mediatization ( Phillip Auslander) and Memes in Digital Culture (Limon Shifman) .

Digital journal
Mid-Lab Prototype Performance
Final Hybrid Performance & Viral Intervention

Class Number

1325

Credits

3

Description

A laboratory for experiment in terms of thought and action, this interdisciplinary critique seminar explores a series of key contemporary themes and issues in the area of live art. The course aims to be both topical and provocative, and as participants, you are invited to take a position (or play devil¿s advocate) in relation to a series of burgeoning topics and issues that are currently forming contemporary discourses concerning art and performance. In particular, this class will have a specific emphasis on interrogating presentational modes and discursive techniques. Through readings, discussion, and presentations, students will have an active stake in the form and nature of these discussions. The course is structured in two parts. In the first part, classes will focus on the activation and physicalization of what we have read. We will undertake practical workshops, embodied theory, provocations, and performance actions as a means of enacting the discourses we have explored. Students will examine their multidisciplinary work through the lens of performance. In the second part of the course, each student will present their current practice in the form of a performance, studio visit or other mode best suited for their work. Various guest artists, scholars and curators will be invited to participate in these final studio critiques.

Class Number

2069

Credits

3

Description

What happens when the past disrupts the present? In this course, students engage in studio practice to explore how archival traces can be reanimated and transformed. Archival gestures may serve as scores for improvisation; silences may become performative landscapes; fragments may be disrupted, recomposed, or recontextualised. These explorations raise critical questions: How can we transform archival fragments into new performative works? What role does documentation play in preserving, transforming, or reinventing performance? As artists, how do we navigate the limits and boundaries of documenting ephemeral work? Graduate students will undertake individual and collaborative projects, integrating archival research with performance methodologies, critical reflection, and interdisciplinary experimentation. By the end of the course, students will have created original performative work that shows nuanced engagement with the archive as a tool, a provocation, and a site of aesthetic, ethical, and historical inquiry.

Class Number

2112

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2319

Credits

3 - 6