About

Elizabeth Hunter is a critical theorist and digital maker. From immersive theatre to augmented/mixed reality technology, her research analyzes the spectatorship activated when we inhabit a canonical story’s space—and the story seeps into ours. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Theatre Studies, Hunter directs the Fabula(b) Theatre + New Media lab, which uses new immersive technology to interrogate liveness, presence and the role of the participatory audience in a mediatized culture. Her work has been supported by Northwestern University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, a Segal Design Fellowship, The Garage at Northwestern, the American Association for University Women Dissertation Completion Fellowship (declined), and Microsoft, where she was one of nine women, worldwide, featured in their inaugural “Women in Mixed Reality” initiative. Hunter’s scholarship has been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and the edited book Research Methods in the Digital Humanities. She presents at conferences across disciplines, from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference and Augmented World Expo. Before returning to academia, Hunter was the founder of a theatre company at a restored blast furnace in Birmingham, Alabama. She holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama program, an M.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Script Development from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.