Lois Weaver

Lois Weaver is a professor of Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London and an independent performance artist, director, and activist. She was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theatre and the WOW Café Theatre in New York City and Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop Theatre in London. Lois has been a performer, director, and writer with the Split Britches Company since 1980. Her interests include live art, solo performance, feminist and lesbian theatre and performance, and human rights. She was involved in Staging Human Rights, a People’s Palace Project initiative that used performance-based practices to explore human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the United Kingdom, which inspired an international conference and festival on the themes of performance and human rights for which Lois was the Artistic Director. She is currently Artistic Director of the Air Project, an Arts Council of England funded initiative that nurtures and sustains established Live Art practitioners and emerging artists in the UK. She was principal investigator on Democratising Technology, a research project that uses performance techniques to initiate conversations on technology design. She continues to collaborate with the Curious company on two projects: On The Scent, an investigation of the relationship between smell and memory, and Lost and Found, a human portrait of urban regeneration. Lois tours with experiments in public engagement such as The Long Table and What Tammy Needs To Know, and Split Britches’ latest collaborations, Miss America, Retro–Perspective, and Lost Lounge.