Magda Romanska is a Professor of Performing Arts and Media at Emerson College in Boston, MA, and Researcher at metaLAB (at) Harvard. She chairs the Transmedia Arts Seminar at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center, where she curates a series of lectures on transmedia arts. She serves on the advisory board of DigitalTheatre+ and is a member of Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.
Her research examines how networked and AI-enabled technologies reconfigure theatrical form, authorship, and access, with interests spanning transmedia dramaturgy, computational analysis of dramatic texts, and disability-centered design for performance. She is the Founder, Executive Director, and Editor-in-Chief of TheTheatreTimes.com, the largest global digital theatre portal (Webby Honoree and winner of ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship). She launched Performap.org, an interactive digital map of theatre festivals, funded through the Yale Digital Humanities Lab and an LMDA Innovation Grant; and IOTF: International Online Theatre Festival, a yearly streaming global theatre festival, which so far has reached over a million participants, and won a second-place Culture Online International Award for “Best Online Project,” chosen among 452 projects from 20 countries.
Romanska is the author or editor of five critically acclaimed scholarly books, and a recipient of MacDowell Fellowship, Mass Council Artist Fellowship, Apothetae and Lark Theatre Playwriting Fellowship from Time Warner Foundation, PAHA Creative Prize, as well as the winner of the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy, and scholarly awards from American Association for Theatre Research, and Polish Studies Association. She has taught courses on theatre and transmedia at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Cornell University, and Emerson College.
She graduated from Stanford and received her doctorate at Cornell University. At Berkman, she leads the Digital Access Research Project (DARP), which advances policy on the digital accessibility of performing arts and the codification of streaming as part of disability law. Upcoming publication based on this project: Digital Access to the Performing Arts: A Comparative Study of Legal and Structural Challenges (Bristol University Press, Policy Series, 2025). Her recent and current research also includes work on cognitive liberty and AI; the ethics of mimicry in AI; and quantum dramaturgy, which theorizes polyphonic drama through concepts such as superposition, entanglement, and the observer effect, offering new analytic models for multi-voiced works and other networked structures. Her article on quantum dramaturgy (“Quantum Dramaturgy: Theory of Polyphonic Drama”) is forthcoming.
