Rose Bruford College Lecturer Phoebe Patey-Ferguson

Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson

Programme Director, MA Performance (Pathway Leader: Queer Performance and Curating); Programme Director, BA Theatre and Social Change

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Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is an academic, producer and artist specialising in the social contexts of contemporary performance, with a focus on queer and trans practices in festivals, nightlife and Live Art. Their work examines how subcultural and countercultural practices by marginalised artists generate community, resist assimilationist narratives and advance radical creative methodologies. Phoebe develops queer and feminist pedagogies that reimagine the performance classroom, foregrounding collaborative and participatory ways of learning.

Phoebe is co-research lead of The Night Club, an international queer performance research network; co-convenor of the Queer Futures Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR); co-founder of the Live Art Research Network with the Live Art Development Agency; founding convenor of the Trans+Queer Working Group at Performance Studies international, and co-chair of the board of Duckie. Founding editor of QPJ: A Journal of Queer Performance Research, they also bring extensive experience as a dramaturg and as a festival and nightlife producer with LIFT, In Between Time and the iconic east London queer venue VFD.

Selected Professional Practice & Industry Work

Performer, White Sands Crystal Foxes (film / installation / VR), directed by Liz Rosenfeld — official selection, Forum Expanded, 72nd Berlinale, Teddy Award nominee, 2022.
Writer and performer, GET UGLY, directed by Neil Bartlett for Duckie, Albany Theatre, London, 2025.
Director and performer, THERESAMAYSMACKDOWN (Femme Feral) — UK tour including The Yard Theatre and Hackney Showrooms (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), Vivid Projects (Birmingham), Buzzcut Festival (Glasgow), Latitude, and Glastonbury, 2016–19.
Curator and General Manager, Vogue Fabrics Dalston (VFD) — daily live performance, music and exhibition programme for the east London LGBTIQ+ venue (2017–19), including producing international performance festival Femmetopia (2018) and co-founding Live Art Club, 2017-.

Awards, Recognition & Media Profile

Shortlisted, London Creative Arts Initiative of the Year, London Higher, 2024.
Winner, Most Compelling and Diverse Curriculum Content, Student-Led Teaching Awards, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2019.
Official selection, Forum Expanded, 72nd Berlinale International Film Festival, and Teddy Award nominee, for White Sands Crystal Foxes, 2022.
The Stage — feature interview on the MA Queer Performance and the under-representation of queer practice in performance training.
Crack Magazine — profile interview on the world’s first MA in Queer Performance
CHASE — alumni spotlight feature

Industry Collaborations & Partnerships

Board and governance roles in the queer performance sector, including co-chair of Duckie
Co-founder and co-lead of the Live Art Research Network (LARN), with the Live Art Development Agency (LADA)
Public programming and curation with Tate, WOW Festival / Southbank Centre, Buzzcut Festival (Glasgow), 101 Outdoor Arts, Coast is Queer (Brighton), Mesto žensk (Lubjljana) and Scottee & Friends
Producing and creative collaborations across the UK festival and live art sectors, including LIFT, In Between Time, VFD, Future Ritual, LADA, Fierce Festival and Queer Up North
Regular dramaturgical and mentorship work for artists including Louise Orwin (Oh Yes Oh No, Cry Cry Kill Kill, Famehungry), Tamm Reynolds and Sweatmother (Dyke, Just Do It).

Teaching & Mentorship

Phoebe teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at Rose Bruford College, including:

MA Performance: Queer Performance + Curating (Co-Programme Director)
BA Theatre and Social Change (Programme Director)

Areas of specialism: queer and trans performance; international festivals of theatre and performance (practices and histories); nightlife; Live Art; performance art; contemporary dramaturgy; queer and feminist performance pedagogies; curation and producing; working class theatre and performance.

Phoebe’s teaching integrates active professional practice, taking students beyond the classroom into festivals, venues and live art contexts and connecting them directly with working artists. Their queer and feminist approach to pedagogy favours collaborative, participatory and student-led ways of working, equipping students to make, curate and produce their own performance.

Research & Knowledge Exchange

Research interests: Practices and histories of international theatre and performance festivals; Contemporary queer and trans performance; Live Art and performance art; Queer nightlife and the cultural economies of queer venues; Fatness, embodiment and non-binary materiality in performance; Queer and feminist performance methodologies (affect, friendship, gossip); Art, activism and institutional power; Queer ecology and commoning.

Phoebe’s research explores how marginalised communities make and sustain culture together and works to understand what holds these spaces together and what threatens them. Spanning international theatre festivals, live art, queer nightlife and questions of embodiment, activism and institutional power, their interdisciplinary work brings together queer, feminist and cultural theory to examine how this work is made, funded and sustained, and to propose alternative modes of production and collective survival.

British Academy Early Career Researcher Network funding, The Night Club (co-lead), 2024
AHRC Doctoral Scholarship, via the Consortium for the Humanities and Arts South East (CHASE), 2014–19

Publications / Research Outputs (selected)

The London International Festival of Theatre: Forty Years of Global Performance on Local Stages. Monograph, Bloomsbury Academic (February 2027).

Co-editor (with Stephen Greer), Live Art Special Issue: Radicalism and Complicity in a Scene of Constraint, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 34, no. 3 (2024).

‘Making Shit Happen: Queer Utility in Nightlife’, co-authored with Joe Parslow, TDR, vol. 70, issue 2 (2026), pp. 144–162.

‘This Will Not End Well? Art, Activism and Institutional Control in Times of Genocide’, Theatre Research International TRI) (forthcoming August 2026)

‘Fat Fists Fisting Fat: An Excessive Queer Performance Manifisto’, in Fat Performance, eds. Jussara Belchior Santos, Magdalena Hutter and Gillie Kleiman (Intellect, 2026).
‘Cronies, Cliques and Lovers: Queer Friendship as Anti-Institutional Practice in UK Live Art Festivals’, co-authored with Simon Holton, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 34, no. 3 (2024), pp. 290–311.
‘From the Finishing School of Marisa Carnesky’, in Obsessions of a Showwoman, ed. Eirini Kartsaki (Intellect, 2024).
‘LIFT and the London 2012 Olympics: Spectacular Experiences’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 39, issue 1 (2023), pp. 18–33.
‘LIFT and the Greater London Council versus Thatcher: London’s Cultural Battleground, 1981’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 36, issue 1 (2020), pp. 4–16.

Academic Qualifications

PhD in Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London (2019) — The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) in Context: 1945–2016; AHRC / CHASE scholarship
MA Performance and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Goldsmiths, University of London (Distinction, 2013)
BA Drama and Theatre Studies, Aberystwyth University (First Class Hons, 2012)

Additional

Curator and host, ‘Maximum Everything: Excess and (Un)Respectability in Club Performance’, Tate Modern (2025)
Keynote, ‘Let’s Go Outside?’, Queering the Arts Outdoors, 101 Outdoor Arts (2025)
Executive-sponsored keynote on queer and trans performance, TaPRA, University of Warwick (2025)

Conference attendance/papers

2026 ––‘Common Queers,’ University of Melbourne, Australia
2025 — ‘Reading Between Voids: From Living Archive to Digital Absence in LIFT’s History (1981–2025)’, The Prism of Festivals in Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
2025 — ‘Longtable D-Liberations: how Queer Nightlife Performance Decentres, Democratises, Distributes and Destroys’, EASTAP, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, UK
2025 — ‘The Right to Appear: Art, Activism and Institutional Control in Times of Genocide’, IFTR, University of Cologne, Germany
2025 — ‘The Art of the Culture War: Lessons from the Battlefields’, Queer Theatre Against the State, University of Regensburg, Germany
2024 — ‘Collective Effervescence Comedowns: The Tragedy of the Heterotopic Commons’, IFTR, University of the Philippines, Manila
2024 — ‘Assembling Queer Friendships at UK Live Art Festivals’, PSi, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London
2023 — ‘Gossiping for Survival’, IFTR, University of Ghana, Accra
2023 — ‘Lifting Belly: Working Out with the Fat Queer Hunk’, TaPRA, University of Leeds, UK
2022 — ‘”And She Went All the Way Up to the Elbow!”: Fisting as Decadent Performance Practice’, Decadent Bodies Conference, British Association of Decadence Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London
2022 — ‘Queer Collective Effervescence Under a Shining Star’, IFTR World Congress, University of Iceland, Reykjavík
2022 — ‘Too Close for Comfort: Sex, Gossip and Power-Knowledge in Live Art Research’, Live Art: Histories of the Present, University of Glasgow
2019 — ‘Pissing on/off the Rich: the Transgender Terrorist Performances of Rose Wood’, TaPRA, University of Exeter
2019 — ‘Cultural Dissonance as a Critical Element in the Production of Heterotopic Theatre Festivals’, TaPRA-SCUDD postgraduate symposium, University of Oxford
2017 — ‘Contemporary European Practice’, Mesto žensk / City of Women, Ljubljana
2017 — ‘On Performance Festivals’, Live Collision / Project Arts Centre, Dublin
2016 — ‘100% London? The (mis)representation of the city in Rimini Protokoll’, Sociology of Theatre and Performance Colloquium, Goldsmiths, University of London
2015 — ‘”I am the real Mimosa”: an exercise in queer world making in the performance choreographies of Trajal Harrell’, Congruence and Contestation: Contemporary Feminism and Performance Conference, University of Roehampton
2015 — ‘Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Bridge: New Perceptions and Transformations of Art in Public Space’, European Doctoral Seminar in Culture, Criticism and Creativity, University of Copenhagen

Founding Editor, QPJ: A Journal of Queer Performance Research (2025–present)

Editorial board, Journal of Performance Magic

Available for PhD supervision across all research and teaching areas.

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