Magda Romanska

Professor Magda Romanska is a pioneering scholar at the intersection of theatre, digital humanities, and technology, whose work is reshaping how we understand performance in the digital age. Her innovative research spans transmedia storytelling, hybrid dramaturgy, and computational analysis of dramatic texts, including the development of drametrics, a pioneering quantitative methodology for analyzing dramatic structures. 

As a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and Principal Researcher at Harvard metaLAB, she leads groundbreaking initiatives examining how digital technologies are transforming theatre and performance, including Digital Access Research Project, and the Future Stage project. The latter released a manifesto on the future of theatre that has been translated into 12 languages. 

Dr. Romanska also chairs the Transmedia Arts seminar at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center, where she curates a series of lectures on transmedia arts. She serves on the advisory board of DigitalTheatre+ and is a member of Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. At Harvard, she is also a Research Associate at the Center for European Studies and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Dr. Romanska is the Founder, Executive Director, and Editor-in-Chief of TheTheatreTimes.com, the largest global digital theatre portal, for which she won numerous international awards, including the ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy from Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of Americas. Under her leadership, she launched Performap.org, an interactive digital map of theatre festivals; and IOTF: International Online Theatre Festival, a yearly streaming global theatre festival, which won a second-place Culture Online International Award for “Best Online Project,” chosen among 452 projects from 20 countries.

Dr. Romanska’s scholarly research has received awards from the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Polish Studies Association. She is the author of five critically acclaimed scholarly books, including The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor (2012); TheaterMachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context (2020); Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2016); The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, a leading and best-selling handbook of dramaturgy; and Boguslaw Schaeffer: An Anthology. 

Her forthcoming books include Dramaturgy and Decolonization in Global Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury Press), The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Theatre (Routledge), and Dramaturgy of Context: Classical Operas in the Modern World (Routledge). 

She is the editor of the 30-volume series Focus on Dramaturgy from Routledge, and her public writing has appeared in Antigone Journal, Big Think, Reed Magazine, The LA Review of Books, The Boston Globe, Hot Review, The Theatre Times, The Conversation, PBS, Salon, and The Cosmopolitan Review.

Dr. Romanska has served on the editorial boards of Theater magazine, the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, Diacritics: A Review Journal of Criticism and Theory, Journal of Law and Theatre, and Polish Theatre Perspectives. She was a founding editor of Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, featured in Print’s Regional Design Annual (2004) and chosen from among over twenty thousand entries.

Dr. Romanska’s work integrates theory and practice. As a playwright, she is a recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship, the Mass Council Artist Fellowship for Dramatic Writing, the Apothetae and Lark Theatre Playwriting Fellowship from the Time Warner Foundation, and the PAHA Creative Arts Prize. 

Her play Opheliamachine premiered at the City Garage Theatre in Los Angeles and was staged at the Berliner Ensemble and the Dhaka University in Bangladesh. It was also published by Bloomsbury in an edited collection that includes nine different translations of the play (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, and Polish).  Her second play, The Life and Times of Stephen Hawking was developed at the Lark Theatre and presented at the Roundabout Theatre Reverb Festival. 

Dr. Romanska has taught at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, and Cornell University. She has also worked on over 30 theatre and opera productions as a dramaturg and director.

CV: https://emerson.academia.edu/MagdaRomanska/CurriculumVitae