Lisa Biggs, PhD

I am a performance studies scholar, actress, and playwright originally from the Southside of Chicago. I currently serve as the John Atwater and Diana Nelson Assistant Professor of the Arts and Africana Studies at Brown University. My artistry and my scholarship are both grounded in questions about the role of the arts in movements for social justice, especially the work of theatre and performance artists who are concerned about the lives and wellbeing of Black women and girls.

My first book, The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation (Ohio State University Press, 2022) emerges from more than 10 years of ethnographic research with some of the most brilliant and vulnerable members of our society —incarcerated women. Focusing on prison and jail-based arts programs in the US and South Africa, I illustrate how Black feminist cultural traditions—theater, dance, storytelling, poetry, humor, and protest—enable incarcerated women to investigate the root causes of crime and refute dominant narratives about incarcerated women. In doing so, the arts initiatives that I write about encourage individual and collective healing, a process of repair that exceeds state definitions of rehabilitation. My case studies offer powerful examples of how the labor of incarcerated Black women artists—some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society—radically extends our knowledge of prison arts programs and our understanding of what is required to resolve human conflicts and protect women’s lives.

In 2023, the American Society for Theatre Research recognized The Healing Stage with the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre. Later that year, the book also won the National Communication Association’s Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies.

You can read more about my research and my theatre-making practices at The Conversation (August 2017), in Theatre Survey (2016), Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches (2016), Solo/Black/Woman: Scripts, Interviews, Essays (2013), and Theatre & Human Flourishing (2021).

I am an artist/scholar. My academic work is intimately connected to my long career as a performing artist.

From 1999-2001, I was a member of the former Living Stage Theatre Company, one of the preeminent theatre for social change programs in the country. There I appeared in hundreds of improvisational theatre pieces and facilitated arts workshops for participants aged 3-103. My acting credits also include productions at the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, African Continuum Theatre, ETA Creative Arts Foundation, Chicago Theatre Company, Baltimore Theatre Project, the National Black Theatre Festival, Cultural Odyssey, Hip Hop Theatre Festival, NY International Fringe, and Lookinglass Theatre, as well as featured roles on radio and TV, and in the documentary, Walk with Me: The Movie (2013).

My most recent original play, AFTER/LIFE, was awarded a 2016 Knight Foundation Detroit Arts Challenge grant to tell stories of women and girls who lit up and lived through the 1967 Detroit rebellion. Directed by Kristin Horton, it premiered in Detroit in July 2017 in conjunction with city-wide events marking the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit rebellion, and played to sold out audiences.

My scholarship and artistry have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Pembroke Center and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Brown University, the Ellen Stone Belic Center for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, Michigan State University, the Michigan Humanities Council, the Global Midwest Initiative at the University of Illinois-Champaign, the State of Illinois, Northwestern University, and the National Endowment for the Arts/Washington DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

I earned a BA in Theatre and Dance from Amherst College (1993), and graduate degrees from New York University's Gallatin School (MA Playwriting and Performance Studies, 2007) and Northwestern University (PhD Performance Studies, 2013).