Lindsey Drury

Lindsey Drury is an early modernist historian and performance studies scholar who works on critical/digital research approaches to colonial history and the ethnological archive. She is a postdoc at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” and holds a PhD in early modern studies (University of Kent at Canterbury / Freie Universität Berlin). She specializes in religious, scholarly and colonial ideas about spiritual dancing communities in Europe and North America from the early modern period through the 19th century. Her postdoctoral project critically analyses settler-colonial writings on ““pagan dance”” that precedented oppression of Indigenous spiritual and community practices.

Lindsey engages extensively in forums for artistic and scholarly exchange, especially on the topic of decolonization. She has presented in the global conference ““Dancing with Decolonization”” and organized the workshop ““Depth of Field: Decolonization and the Grounds of Art(istic) Research”” as well as the series ““Practices of Unsettling”” within the 25th Digital Research in Humanities and Arts conference. She has published in Dance Research Journal, the European Journal of Theatre and Performance, and contributed to a MARKK Museum exhibition catalogue on Aby Warburg and Pueblo Art (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022) and the performance art compendium Institution is a Verb (New York: Operating System, 2021).

Drury’s approach to performance history and digital scholarship is further informed by her artistic work in intermedia performance. She has been a resident artist at Pioneer Works, Momenta Art, Gibney Dance, and Cora Dance, and a board member of the Association for Performance Art in Berlin. Drury has worked with “Bessie” and Guggenheim award-winning choreographer Yvonne Meier and MacArthur awardee Guillermo Gómez- Peña. Her own dance and performance works have been presented at the Queens Museum, St Mark’s Church, Issue Project Room, Judson Church, ZK/U Berlin, CARPA Helsinki, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Chashama, and elsewhere.