Elizabeth Hunter is a critical theorist and digital maker exploring the future of live performance and emergent technologies. Her research asks what happens when we inhabit the space of a famous story, and the story seeps into our own.

Her first monograph, Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance (University of Michigan Press 2025), offers a new paradigm for understanding how audiences participate in immersive theater, from physical spaces like the Globe in London to digital spaces like social virtual reality. She is currently working on her next book project, which mounts the first scholarly analysis of digital resurrection—the use of AI and spatial computing to bring back the dead—as performance. Titled, “Death Is Obsolete: Staging Resurrection in the Age of AI,” this project explores how a critical lens of performance theory can illuminate the user roles and production choices inherent in digitally resurrecting all manner of bodies, from the corporeal to the architectural.

Read Dr. Hunter's full bio here!