Bryan Reynolds

Bryan Reynolds grew up in Scarsdale, New York, where he attended Heathcote Elementary School and graduated from Scarsdale High School. After an attempt at a career racing motorcycle motocross, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his bachelor degree in English Literature. He then went on to receive his master's and doctoral degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor, Chancellor's Professor and Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, the latter an endowed research chair funded by the Donald Bren Foundation. He has held visiting professorships at the University of London-Queen Mary; University of Amsterdam; Utrecht University; University of Cologne; University College Utrecht; Goethe University Frankfurt; the University of California-San Diego; the American University of Beirut; the University of Tsukuba, Japan; Klagenfurt University, Austria; the University of Nairobi, Kenya; INSEEC Business School (L’Institut des hautes études économiques et commerciales), France; ESSCA (École supérieure des sciences commerciales d’Angers), France; and the Université de Lorraine, France. And he has taught seminars and workshops at Deleuze Camp, Germany; The Grotowski Institute, Poland; Live Lactic Culture, Lebanon; Dawar Arts and Nahda Arts School, Egypt; and the Jenin Freedom Theatre; Palestine, among other academic and arts institutions. He is the Artistic Director of the Amsterdam/Los Angeles-based Transversal Theater Company, a director of theater, a performer, and a playwright. His plays and musicals have been produced in over 80 venues in 25 countries worldwide, including major international theater festivals, such as Romania’s National Theatre Festival and Poland’s Gdańsk International Shakespeare Festival. His academic books include Excess & Joy: Philosophical Transversations (2022), The Transversality of Gregory de la Haba: The Future of Art and Myth are Upon Us (2022); Intermedial Theater: Performance Philosophy, Transversal Poetics, and the Future of Affect (2017), Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009), Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006), Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2004), and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002). And he is editor of Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories (2015), and co-editor of The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, Volumes I & II (2014, 2011), Critical Responses to Kiran Desai (2009), Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005), and Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). As co-general editor of Performance Interventions, a book series in performance studies from Palgrave Macmillan, he shepherded twenty-five books to print. Reynolds is currently writing a book and editing another with Mark LeVine on performance activism in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa; and he is writing a book on the performance aesthetics, sociology, and neurobiology of extreme sports. He is a contributing author at Freeskier Magazine.