Shannon Jackson

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus Hadidi Chair in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. Most recently, she has been appointed to be UC Berkeley’s first Associate Vice Chancellor of Arts and Design, with a charge to advance and expand the campus’s commitment to the arts. Jackson’s own research and teaching focuses on two broad, overlapping domains: collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms; and the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change.

Jackson serves on the boards of Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the English Institute, and the Oakland Museum of California. She also serves on the advisory boards of several journals and arts organizations; she has been a plenary speaker at a variety of distinguished venues, including most recently the Venice Biennial, ArtCOP21, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the PUBLIC Theater, Tate Modern, Creative Time, the Sorbonne, the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, Open Engagement, and many other universities and art organizations.

Her most recent books include The Builders Association: Media and Performance in Contemporary Theater and Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, and the forthcoming online anthology of keywords, In Terms of Performance, co-edited with Paula Marincola and the Pew Center for Art & Heritage. Her previous books include Lines of Activity and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Shannon has received numerous awards, including a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Performance Studies (NCA), the ATHE Best Book Award, and the Arts and Humanities Outstanding Service Award.