Aniko Szucs
Aniko Szucs is a theater and performance studies scholar and dramaturg. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and an M.F.A. in Theatre Studies and Dramaturgy from the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. Prior to joining Queens College, Dr. Szucs was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Theater at Skidmore College and held two postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and Haverford College. She has worked as a resident and a production dramaturg in theaters across the U.S. and Hungary.
Dr. Szucs’s research interests include Central and East European political theater, feminist protest movements and performances, politics of memory, and the genealogy and critique of surveillance. Inspired by her doctoral research, Dr. Szucs has published articles on the communist state security files, studying how contemporary performances and museums challenge the postcommunist state’s instrumentalization of the cultural memory of oppressive state surveillance. Her current research and book project, tentatively titled Gestures of Radical Care: The Affect and Aesthetics of Political Resistance in Hungary, explores feminist urban protests, performances, and radical care. By advocating for an ethics of reciprocity, “fellow feeling,” and “feeling with the others,” feminist scholarship envisions radical care as an empathetic mode of coexistence that brings together different affinity communities to resist patriarchal, colonial, and other repressive power structures. Dr. Szucs’s research aims to expand this transnational scholarly discussion by exploring artworks and art events that facilitate such socio-political interventions in Central-East Europe and Russia, particularly in countries where the anti-care policies and ideologies of the authoritarian state have framed gestures of care as dissension.
Dr. Szucs worked as the resident dramaturg of Vígszínház (Comedy Theatre) and as a production dramaturg at the Hungarian National Theater and the Radnóti Theater in Budapest. U.S. credits include Merchant of Venice at Portland Center Stage, A Man’s a Man at the Arena Stage in Washington D.C., and Trouble in Paradise and Frequency Hopping, produced by the Hourglass Group in New York. In her current dramaturgical project, Dr. Szucs is developing a new play about the life of the first female film director, Alice Guy-Blaché with playwright Elyse Singer and Hourglass Group, supported thus far by New York Theater Workshop’s Summer Residency and the Catwalk Art Residency.
As a curator, Dr. Szucs worked on the exhibition “Revolutionary Voices: Performing Arts in Central & Eastern Europe in the 1980s” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center. She also curated the online exhibitions “Visual Acts of Radical Care: An Exhibition of Female Artists-Activists from Central and Eastern Europe” at Yale University and “Insatiabilities” at Performance Studies international (PSi #27). Since her fellowship at Yale, Dr. Szucs has been working on the digital humanities project, “The Art of Resistance: A Platform for Protest Movements and Performances in Central-East Europe and Russia,” to create an open-access archive of performances of resistance and foster a virtual network of scholars, artists, and activists who stand up against the illiberal governments in the region.