About

"An artistic alchemist walking among us." –The Austin Chronicle

Jack Isaac Pryor (b. 1977, Evanston, IL) is a writer, theater and performance studies scholar, educator, and artist who is deeply committed to these practices as sites of research and experiment. Their research centers on live art as it intersects with questions of time, space, history, and memory. This research takes them into the convergent fields of performance studies, cultural studies, queer and transgender studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, trauma studies, and affect theory.

Their first book, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Northwestern University Press), examines the capacity of performance to rewrite histories of racialized and gendered violence, as well as to reveal queer and transgender futures not determined by past harm. The book also experiments with form, moving between academic prose and creative nonfiction. Time Slips was a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies. They are the co-editor, with Stacy Wolf, of Sondheim from the Side (2023)—a Special of Issue of Studies in Musical Theatre which focuses on the impact of the late composer Stephen Sondheim’s work on minoritarian artists and critics.

They have also contributed essays and reviews to Ollantay Theatre Magazine, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, TDR/The Drama Review, Theatre Topics, and Theatre Journal, as well as in various edited collections. This writing focuses on new work by minoritarian artists whose practice upends disciplinary boundaries and identity-based categories. Subjects of study have included, among others, Alain Buffard, Marga Gomez, Carmelita Tropicana, Deb Margolin, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. They have also published essays on feminist and abolitionist pedagogy, queer temporality, minoritarian performance and visual culture, sex, state violence, and experimental modes of art and cultural criticism. Their essay about performance criticism and queer politics, which they co-authored with Jill Dolan and Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, appears in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.

Their creative writing/writing for performance is published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and The Austin Project, edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth (University of Texas Press). From 2004-2005, they were an active member of The Austin Project, a women of color and allied artist/activist/scholar collective, founded by Jones and Bridgforth, that create original performance in what Jones calls a “theatrical jazz aesthetic." Their creative non-fiction essay, “On the Conviction of Derek Chauvin in the Murder of George Floyd, or, Blue,” was published by QT Voices, the magazine of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of both the Austin Project and LGBTQ Studies at UT. Its companion essay/performative provocation, “Future Perfect,” was published in Imagined Theatres, edited by Daniel Sack. Their current collaboration with Lindsay Reckson, Loving Description, is a long-form, open-source, site-specific writing project that attempts to place art and cultural criticism in the public sphere.

For more than 20 years, they have also been making socially engaged theater and performance both inside and outside of traditional theatrical spaces–often working site-specifically and engaging the natural and built environment as source material. Their work pushes the limits of the physical body in performance, plays with the materiality of time and space, re-imagines the audience-event relationship, and expands our understanding of what is possible in live art and in our everyday lives.

Their artistic practice draws from and contributes to multiple genres of performance, blending physical theatre, immersive theatre, post-dramatic theatre, site-specific theatre, performance art, and community-based performance/art as social practice. This critically acclaimed work has been presented at theatres, galleries, colleges and universities, and public places throughout the U.S., including Austin; Amherst; Chicago; Lubbock; New York; Northampton; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; and Wassaic, New York. Their 7-year performance project, floodlines, was supported by a grant from the City of Austin’s Division of Cultural Arts, The Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Their nationally touring community-engaged performance project, pink: a (love) courier service, was commissioned by First Night Austin with support from the Stillwater Foundation, and was the subject of the documentary film, Love Delivered (SEMA Films/dir. Wes Browning). Recent work includes a devised adaptation of Euripides’s Medea with original libretto and live harmonium; the food-based, community-engaged immersive performance, good luck: a regathering at Fringe Arts, with artist Devyn Lorelei Manibo; and the durational performance event, 24 Hour Medea, in which the Greek tragedy repeats and revises 24 times over the course of an entire day (currently in progress). They are also co-founder of The Movement Lab, an artist-run collective focused on movement research, with Javiera Benavente and Heather Kuhn.

As an educator, they specialize in experimental performance and queer, trans, and feminist theories and methods. Their courses combine studio-based practice with the rigorous study of social history and critical theory—training students to be skilled theater and performance artists, efficacious activists, socially engaged writers, and astute semioticians of the worlds that they create in both print and embodied forms. They are currently Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Penn State-Abington, where they hold the Career Development Professorship. In the 2020-21 academic year, they also served as a Regional Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at The University of Pennsylvania (Forum on “Choice”). Their essay on abolitionist performance pedagogy, “‘Emergent Strategy’: Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time,” which they co-authored with Marissa Nicosia, appears in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (2023).

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, they taught in the Theater Department at Reed College, where they held an affiliate appointment in the Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies Program. They’ve also held visiting positions at Haverford College, Hampshire College, and Northern Arizona University and served as a guest artist/speaker at the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, Arizona State University, Brown University, Bryn Mawr College, Colby College, Dickinson College, Haverford College, Princeton University, Swarthmore College, St. Edward’s University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at Austin, and the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale–as well as in various community-based contexts, including the Dell Jewish Community Center, St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, and Nellie Muir Elementary School. 

They received their BA in Performing Arts from Washington University in St. Louis and their MA and PhD in Theater from the University of Texas at Austin (designated emphasis in Performance as Public Practice), also earning Graduate Certificates in Cultural Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies (LGBTQ Studies emphasis).

They have completed advanced training in Lecoq with The Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training and Paola Coletto/The School for Theatre Creators; Viewpoints and Composition with Anne Bogart/The SITI Company, Mary Overlie, Tina Landau, and Kim Rubinstein; Suzuki with The SITI Company; Devising/Performance Creation with DoubleEdge Theatre, Plasticene Physical Theatre, and Michael Rohd/Sojourn Theatre; and land-based art practices with Land Arts of the American West. Other artists with whom they have studied and/or collaborated who have had a major influence on their practice include choreographers Ann Carlson, Rosie Herrera, and Liz Lerman; and interdisciplinary performance artists Laurie Carlos, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sekou Sundiata, and Split Britches.

A first generation / third generation American Jew (Ashkenazi), their family immigrated to the U.S. as refugees in 1949, after surviving the Holocaust in occupied Poland and forced displacement in Germany; and from the Pale of Settlement in the early 20th century, after surviving the pogroms in the Russian Empire. They grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and currently reside in Philadelphia, PA, on occupied Lenape land. It is their intention that their work be in service to the rightful return of the land to its peoples, and towards healing, justice, and liberation for all.

CV and artist portfolio available upon request.