Magda Romanska

Magda Romanska is a writer, dramaturg and theatre, performance and media scholar. She researches issues on the intersection of theatre, media, and technology, including multiplatform dramaturgy, human/AI interaction in performance, the ethics and representation of human enhancements, and posthuman theatre and performance.

A graduate of Stanford’s interdisciplinary honors program in Modern Thought and Literature, and of Cornell’s doctoral program in Theatre, Film and Dance, Romanska is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dramaturgy at Emerson College in Boston, MA, a Research Associate at the Center for European Studies and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, the Chair of Transmedia Arts seminar at Harvard University Mahindra Humanities Center, where she curates a series of lectures on transmediality. She serves the advisory board of DigitalTheatre+, and is the member of Leonardo, International Society for The Arts, Sciences and Technology.

She is also the Founder, Executive Director, and Editor-in-Chief of TheTheatreTimes.com, the largest global digital theatre portal. In this capacity, she leads a team of over 140 Regional Managing Editors around the world, covering theatre in over 90 countries and regions. In 2019, she also launched Performap.org — an interactive digital map of theatre festivals, funded through Yale Digital Humanities Lab and LMDA Innovation Grant; and IOTF: International Online Theatre Festival – a year streaming global theatre event.

She is a recipient of 2021 Mass Council Artist Fellowship for Dramatic Writing, and 2017 Apothetae and Lark Theatre Playwriting Fellowship from Time Warner Foundation, as well as the winner of the 2018 Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy, and Aquila Polonica Prize from Polish Studies Association, and Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize from American Society for Theatre Research for her scholarly writing.

She is the author or editor of four critically acclaimed theatre books, and a sole editor of a ten-volume series Focus on Dramaturgy from Routledge. In addition to her scholarly work, she published in Reed Magazine, The Conversation, PBS, Salon, The LA Review of Books, The Boston Globe, The Theatre Times, and The Cosmopolitan Review. She has taught 30 different courses on theatre, performance and transmedia, including at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Cornell University, and Emerson College; and worked on over 30 theatre and opera productions.

At metaLAB, she researches her new book project on transmediality of multiplatform, multisite, multigenre narratives, which in addition to deploying familiar plot-driven structural devices (inciting incident, climax, denouement), often incorporate multiple access points, serendipity, immersion, worldbuilding, role play, seriality, and time/space co-presence. With new technologies and new genres, transmedial dramaturgy also developed new questions: how are we to analyze, think critically, and develop narratives that use multiple structural and architectural frameworks?