Chris Hay

Chris Hay is Professor of Drama at the Flinders Drama Centre, a position he took up in 2022 after previous appointments at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), the University of New England (UNE), and the University of Queensland (UQ). He is an Australian theatre and cultural historian, whose work examines funded cultural output for what it can tell us about national anxieties and preoccupations. His new book, Contemporary Australian Playwriting: Re-visioning the Nation on the Mainstage co-written with Stephen Carleton, was published by Routledge in 2022.

Chris currently holds a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council for his project on the origins of live performance subsidy in Australia between 1949 and 1975. A major output of that project is the Shadow Canon Collection, an online resource collecting unpublished Australian plays and making them available to performers and researchers to deepen engagement with our national theatre history, which will go live in 2024.

As a theatre director, Chris is particularly interested in German Modernism. His recent work directing students includes Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in his own translation at UNE, and Max Frisch’s The Arsonists at UQ. He works with the unique identity practice pioneered by Kristine Landon-Smith, in a collaboration they began at NIDA, and they have co-published in acting manuals including Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training.

Outside of the University, Chris is the Co-President of ADSA, the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies, and a past co-convenor of the Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). He is the Deputy Editor of the open-access e-journal Performance Paradigm, and an Associate Editor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training, where he co-edited a 2021 special issue on Performer Training in Australia.