Magda Romanska is a Professor of Performing Arts and Media at Emerson College in Boston, MA, and Principal 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. At Harvard, she is also a Research Associate at the Center for European Studies and at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Her research focuses on the intersection of art, humanities, technology, and transmedia storytelling, including multiplatform and metaverse dramaturgy, and human-AI interaction in performance. She is the founder of drametrics, a quantitative, computational analysis of dramatic texts.
She is also the Founder, Executive Director, and Editor-in-Chief of TheTheatreTimes.com, the largest global digital theatre portal. 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. In 2021, the IOTF 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 chairs Digital Access Research Project (DARP), which focuses on digital accessibility of performing arts events and the codification of streaming as part of the disability laws in the US and globally.