Education
Ph.D. Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford University
M.A. Performance Studies, New York University
M.A. Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement (Concentration: Gender Politics), New York University
B.A. English & Creative Writing, Colorado College
Research
Raegan Truax is a performance artist and scholar working broadly across the disciplines of performance studies, dance, gender and sexuality studies, art history, visual culture, and disability studies. Their research explores questions about time, memory, territory, affective exchange, and labor—particularly in regard to queer feminist histories of subversive art, abolition, and radical resistance.
Truax is working on their first book Durational Performance: Temporalities of the Untimely Body which focuses on global women and/or genderqueer artists who bend, suspend, and manipulate time as a political material.
As part of their embodied scholarship praxis, Truax also curates ON DURATION, a project that brings together and supports internationally renowned durational performance artists for creative research and public praxis culminating in live events.
Truax’s durational performances have been included within The Marina Abramović Institute’s Immaterial archive and presented at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U) in Berlin, SOMarts in San Francisco, grüntaler9 in Berlin, The Northern California Performance Platform, Stanford University’s Department of Art and Architecture, Berlin Art Week, Performance Studies International, and Artist's Television Access (ATA) in San Francisco. They have additionally performed at Centro Negra with AADK in Blanca Spain, Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City, the Performance Arts Institute in San Francisco, and The New Museum in New York City as collaborator to Carlos Motta’s international art project We Who Feel Differently. More recently, Truax performed Citation for 37 consecutive hours at CounterPulse in San Francisco, and choreographed Sloughing, which included 35 performers and occurred across 19 different locations in the Bay Area over 28-days. In 2019, Truax was invited to participate in HERstory, an international archive project centered on interviewing current feminist artists about making feminist work (Truax's interview).
Publications
Books and Book Chapters
"Queer Bloodlines: Materiality and Duration in Live Art" in The Phenomoenology of Bloody Performance Art edited by Chelsea Coon and tjb. Taylor and Francis Routledge, 2023.
“A Politics of Fatigue” in Class Acts: Material Relations and Performance Aesthetics edited by Elizabeth Tomlin. London: Methuen, 2023 (under contract).
“Performance Art and Sexuality” in Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education edited by Breanne Fahs. Palgrave, 2022.
We Who Feel Differently by Carlos Motta, Cristina Motta, Jiwon Lee, Pedro Lama, and Raegan Truax. New York: Ctrl+Z Publishing, 2011.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
“Durational Performance and Queer Refrain,” Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts vol. 16 no. 1: 52-77.
“A Period Piece that Endures: 28 Reflections on Sloughing” co-authored with Alexis Bard Johnson for PRJ: Performance Research Journal 27:8 Special Issue “On Blood”(forthcoming, 2023).
Reviews
2021. Review of Responding to Site: The Performance Works of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless (eds). TDR: The Drama Review, 65(4), 184-186
2019. Review of Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960, by Laura Shalson. Modern Drama, 62(4), 576-579.
2019. Review of Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance, by Sondra Fraleigh (ed). Dance Research Journal, 51(2), 87-89.
Scholarship About Truax
Bobel, Chris and Breanne Fahs. “The Messy Politics of Menstrual Activism.” Nevertheless, They Persisted: Feminisms and Continued Resistance in the U.S. Women's Movement, edited by Jo Reger, New York, New York: Routledge, 151-169, 2019
— republished in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies edited by Chris Bobel, Inga T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Hasson, Elizabeth Arveyda Kissling, and Tomi-Ann Roberts. Palgrave Macmillan, pp 1001-1018, 2020.
Fahs, Breanne and Ela Przybylo. “Feels and Flows: On the Realness of Menstrual Pain and Cripping Menstrual Chronicity.” Feminist Formations, 30(1), 206-229.
Gade, Rune. “The Red Current: On Menstrual Blood as a Matter of Art and Activism.” Periskop – forum for kunsthistorisk debat, no. 26, 2021, 62-81
Johnson, Alexis Bard. “Summoning Ghosts: Reflections on Raegan Truax’s Citation.” Ecumencia: Journal of Theatre and Performance, 13(1), 2020, 118–124.
Ormiston, Rebecca, “Exchange by Raegan Truax,” Performance Studies International #19 (blog), 2013.
Curatorial
2022 ON DURATION, Mellon Symposium, Hurford Center for Arts and Humanities
2021 Untimely Transgressions, Humanities Forum, Hurford Center for Arts and Humanities
2019 “Remembering Carolee Schneemann” with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, CounterPulse (San Francisco)
2015 Time Displacement Symposium, Co-Creator, Aktuelle Architektur der Kultur hosted by Centro Negra, Blanca, Spain
2012 We Who Feel Differently: A Symposium, The New Museum, New York City
Current Courses
Fall 2022: Now/Then: Art and Abolition 1966-2022
Spring 2023: Disability in Live Art
Previous Courses
300: Untimely Art and Performance
300: Queer Archival Desires
300: Live Art Now
200: The Art of Duration
200: Performance Theory and Practice
200: Performance Art
150: Critical Making
150: Art and Politics: The Manifesto
150: Foundations in Critical Studies: Discipline
150: Foundations in Critical Studies: Making/Meaning
100: Introduction to Performance Studies