Biography
Jasmine Mahmoud is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington, with affiliate/adjunct appointments in Art History and Comparative History of Ideas.
An arts journalist and scholar, Mahmoud writes about minoritized artists often excluded from official archives. She has over 50 articles, essays, interviews, and reviews in academic journals including Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, and Women & Performance, and in arts and community-centered publications including Art Forum, Canadian Art Review, Crosscut’s Black Arts Legacies series, Howlround, Hyperallergic, LitHub, South Seattle Emerald, and Variable West. She also has curated three visual art exhibitions with attention to Black aesthetics.
She is co-editor of Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2021) with Megan Geigner and Stuart Hecht, which was awarded the 2020 ASTR Collaborative Research Award. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies and the American Journal of Arts Management. She presents at conferences including AAG, ASA, ASAP, ASTR, ATHE, and PSi.
Mahmoud’s 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 performance theory, minoritarian aesthetics, performance ethnography, cultural policy, racial capitalism, and processes of urbanism. She leads UW’s Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster, sponsored by the Simpson Center.
Her current book project is Avant-Garde Geographies: Race, Public Policy, and Experimentation in the Urban Frontier. This ethnographic performance history investigates the trend of experimental art practices -- such as avant-garde theater, experimental dance, and social practice works -- taking space in urban margins (often called “frontiers”) in early 21st century New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle. It queries relationships among aesthetic and embodied practices, race, public policy, and urbanization processes.
An arts advocate, Mahmoud founded the Seattle Arts Voter Guide, and currently serves as a Gov. Inslee-appointed Washington State Arts Commissioner, and committee member for Tacoma Art Museum’s The Current Black Artist Award. She has mentored youth journalists for TeenTix’s Press Corps program.