I am a theatre and performance lecturer currently based at the University of Edinburgh. I am also a freelance theatre-maker, having worked mostly as an assistant director. I completed my PhD in March 2024 with the submission of my thesis, ‘Matrix of Shame: A Feminist Reading of Shame, the Body and Radical Disruption in the Performance Work of Marina Abramović, Samuel Beckett and Ana Mendieta’. My specialism is the intersection between theatre/performance, psychoanalytical studies, affect theory and the cultural politics of emotion. My work considers shame’s role in the social categorisation of bodies and the matrices of power that govern them. Taking a specifically female-gendered and socio-political approach to shame, my work reveals the role of shame in marginalising and oppressive systems of power, but paradoxically, when read through these performance works, it offers a reframing of shame as constructive, productive and disruptive of normative social and cultural constructs in radical ways. I look at concepts and theories of the body, trauma, femininity, hybridity, hydro and eco-feminism, disgust, risk and rage.

At a time of great socio-political fissures, my research is interested in the ways that performance can foster understanding of psychic and somatic manifestations of shame, and in positioning it as a site for negotiating public and personal traumatic experience.

The project is fully-funded by the James and Elizabeth Knowlson Studentship, University of Reading.

Since completing my MA in Text and Performance at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and Birkbeck College, University of London, I have worked on a variety of theatre productions including Ella by Odessa Celt as part of the Collaborators project at Harmony Hall, Rendezvous in Bratislava at Battersea Arts Centre, Game Theory at Tristan Bates Theatre, Hansel and Gretel at Mercury Theatre, Shutters at Park Theatre, Three to Four Days at Theatre 503 and Edinburgh Fringe and The Magic Flute for The Pimlott Foundation, among others. I devised new work and performed extensively during my MA training at RADA, and have been involved in the development and performance of multiple projects during my career.

I have worked extensively with young people in a range of contexts and I currently hold the post of Teaching Fellow in Drama and Performance in the school of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh where I teach, lecture and supervise on a combination of practice and seminar-based modules. I was most recently Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Reading where I taught across a wide range of modules in the department of Film, Theatre and Television from 2017 until December 2024. I have also lectured in theatre and performance practice and theory at the University of West London, Buckinghamshire New University and London Metropolitan University.

My writing has been published in ‘Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui’, ‘The Beckett Circle’, Samuel Beckett and Ecology, ‘The Journal of Beckett Studies’ and I have several other forthcoming publications at the intersection of performance, psychoanalysis and feminism. In 2023 I co-edited a special issue entitled, ‘Spectral Landscapes, Borders and Absences’. I am currently developing my first non-fiction book and writing creatively.

My other interests include Pina Bausch, tupperware, wine drinking, Grotowski, leopard print and Sister Act.

ztweed@ed.ac.uk