Priya Thomas, PhD (she/her), is a musician, dancer/choreographer, and theatre historian. Her scholarly and creative activities reflect a multidisciplinary practice concerned with embodiment, nonhumans, and the limits of materiality in performance. More broadly, her projects investigate the material traces and afterlives of performance (theatre, dance, and music), asking how artistic events persist, transform, or disappear through social practices and technologies: letters, recordings, archives, and acts of remembrance.
Current projects include Pleasure Pier, a new record written and performed under the name Blood Heron, produced and mastered by Sandro Perri (forthcoming 2026); Dramaturgies of Distance: Sound, Itinerancy, and Epistolary Performance, a companion artist book currently under submission; and The Last of the Rhinestone Cowboys, a Canada Council–funded research-creation project on South Asian performance histories in Montreal, and a monograph on the nonhuman in dance and performances of the long nineteenth century. From 2021 to 2024, she served as Book Review Editor for Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada (University of Toronto Press). Her practice is based in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts at Brock University
Sound, Itinerancy, and Epistolary Performance
Book and audio recording project
(in development)
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