Sarah Thomasson

Senior Lecturer Sarah Thomasson is a theatre and performance studies scholar and ARC DECRA fellow specialising in festival studies and digital humanities. Her research in festival studies integrates interdisciplinary research methods to develop new directions for the field. Her first monograph The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), brought cultural geography and theatre studies to bear on a comparative study of the relationship between these cities and their flagship festivals. An earlier 2019 article on the Adelaide Fringe for Contemporary Theatre Review won the Marlis Thiersch Prize for Research Excellence from the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) in 2020.

Sarah also led, with Dr James Wenley (Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington) a major research project to harmonise the live performing arts databases of AusStage and Theatre Aotearoa. “Building Global Relationships for Live Performing Arts Databases” (Nov 2021–Jan 2025) was funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Catalyst seeding grant and led to the development of a transnational live performing arts database and the Performing Data in Australasia seminar series with Wenley and Professor Jonathan Bollen (National Taiwan Normal University). This work to showcase how artists use data in creating performance and how performance data is visualised within research has been further developed into Performing Data: Theatre Practice and Research (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) co-written with Wenley, Bollen, and Dr Mara Davis Johnson (University of Wollongong).

Sarah’s current research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, explores the network of international arts festivals in Aotearoa and Australia and how they work collaboratively and/or competitively to support the flow of cultural production around the region and beyond. She also has research interests in contemporary feminist performance practices and performance economies and her creative practice is stage and production management. In June 2026, she produced Don’t Look Now by Angie Farrow and directed by David O’Donnell at BATS Theatre in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington.

She is co-chair, with Professor Chris Hay, of the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies (ADSA) and an editor for Contemporary Theatre Review.