Shannon Jackson is the Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design, the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Chair of the Humanities, and a Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She 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, Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Kahan Scholar's Prize in Theatre History (ASTR), and the Arts and Humanities Outstanding Service Award. She has received fellowships from the Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and serves on the boards of Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the English Institute. Her most recent books are The Builders Association: Media and Performance in Contemporary Theater and Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics; her previous books include Lines of Activity and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity.
Jackson is the co-editor of the online keywords anthology In Terms of Performance, produced by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the Arts Research Center, University of California, Berkeley in December 2016. The web-based publication features essays and interviews from more than 50 prominent artists, curators, presenters, and scholars who reflect on common yet contested terms in interdisciplinary cultural practice.
In October 2013, Jackson moderated a roundtable discussion at FringeArts in Philadelphia, produced by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, along with Richard Schechner (NYU), Sharon Hayes (visual artist), and Patricia Lent (Merce Cunningham Trust). That same weekend Lucinda Childs re-presented a half-dozen of her early dance works, with Center funding; the group met to discuss reconstruction, restaging, and reenactment across artistic fields.
