DOROTA SOSNOWSKA
Dorota Sosnowska is a cultural studies scholar at the University of Warsaw. She is interested in the histories and theories of performance, with a particular focus on the anthropology of performance.
Her PhD project focused on Polish theatre history and was concerned with stage images of three actresses from the communist era: Irena Eichlerówna, Nina Andrycz and Elżbieta Barszczewska, who played famous queens with remarkable success in the times of the 'workers’ and peasants’ alliance'. She then became interested in the intersection of performance studies and archive theories. She has published articles, in Polish and in English, on the performance of leftovers, the body as a medium of history and memory, on reenactment and reconstruction, some of which she wrote with Dorota Sajewska. They also edited a book together on workers and performances of memory. At this stage, she became interested not only in theatre and performance art but also in contemporary visual art, video and film, following diverse possibilities to understand performativity as a mode of reading and looking at different media in search of the disappearing, the invisible or the unmarked—as Peggy Phelan would have it.
Currently, she is leading a research project titled Odmieńcy: Performances of Otherness in Polish Transition Culture devoted to non-representational (Nigel Thrift) practices in social life, theatre and art undertaken in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the abortion ban introduced in Poland in 1993. She looks at affects and emotions that 'stick' (Sara Ahmed) different bodies and images with HIV. She analyses the use of meat in feminist art as a non-representation of the female body. She reflects on dis-orientation (Ahmed) in the reception of Polish productions of American and British dramas depicting the AIDS epidemic.
She is also on the editorial board of the academic journal View: Practices and Theories of Visual Culture.
​​