Interview with Rebecca Schneider, conducted by Diana Taylor, founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This interview is a part of a series curated by the Hemispheric Institute, articulated around the question 'What is Performance Studies?' The series aims to provide a multifaceted approach to the often difficult task of defining the coordinates of both a field of academic study as well as a lens through which to assess and document cultural practice and embodied behavior. The contingent definitions documented in this series are based on the groundbreaking experiences and the scholarly endeavors of renowned figures in contemporary performance studies and practice.

Rebecca Schneider is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She teaches performance studies, theater studies, and theories of intermedia. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge 1997) and Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, (Routledge 2011). She has also co-edited the anthology Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to 20th-Century Directing. She is a consortium editor for TDR: The Drama Review, contributing editor to Women and Theatre, coeditor with David Krasner of the book series "Theatre: Theory/Text/Performance" with University of Michigan Press, and consulting editor for the series "Performance Interventions" with Palgrave McMillan. Professor Schneider has published essays in several anthologies, including Psychoanalysis and Performance, Acting Out: Feminist Performance, Performance and Cultural Politics, Performance Cosmologies, Performance and the City, and the essay "Solo Solo Solo" in After Criticism. As a "performing theorist," she has collaborated with artists at such sites as the British Museum in London and the Mobile Academy in Berlin, and delivered lectures at museums such as the Guggenheim in New York and the Gulbenkian in Lisbon.

Professor Schneider has written extensively on theatre and performance practices that stretch accepted borders around media. She has written on performance art, photography, architecture, and everyday life as "performative." Her research interests are related to theatre history as well as to performance art, gender- and race-critical performance, and visual culture and performance. Her first book engaged with artists who use their own bodies as the stage for their performances, situating them within theatre and art historical traditions of the "avant-garde" and reading their work relative to feminist and race critical theory. She is currently working on practices in visual and performance art that labor under the rubric "reenactment."