Jasmine Mahmoud is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington, with affiliate appointments in Art History and Comparative History of Ideas. Her research engages contemporary performance and art practices, and their relationships with race, feminist and queer of color critique, public policy, and geography. She focuses particularly on minoritarian aesthetics, performance ethnography, cultural policy, racial capitalism, and urbanism. She co-edited of Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2021) with Megan Geigner and Stuart Hecht, and has over 50 articles in academic journals and in community-led publications.

Her project, a critical performance history, Avant-Garde Geographies: Race, Public Policy, and Experimentation in the Urban Frontier, investigates the early 21st century trend of avant-garde performance practices—including performance art, social practice, and experimental theater and dance—making (and taking) space in urban margins in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle, four arts-rich cities. Through ethnographic interviews, performance documentation, public policy analysis, and archival research, the manuscript examines how artistic practices interacted with processes of racialization and urbanization found in the “urban frontier” (Neil Smith), such as gentrification, displacement/erasure, and “renewal.”