Greetings,
The PSi board would like to announce the election of PSi’s new president, Dr. Pil Hansen of the University of Calgary! Many of our members will remember Dr. Hansen from her meticulous organization of PSi #25 Elasticity in 2019. Dr. Hansen has begun transitioning into her new role and will officially take office in July of 2020.
Although new board members usually start their terms at the end of our annual conference, this year the organization is following a different model due to the current circumstances produced by the pandemic. Dr. Hansen and I have been meeting to familiarize her with the position of president, and she will be involved with the board in helping to choose the remaining open positions (which will be announced in June with applications due shortly thereafter).
In the meantime, the PSi board would like to share a little information about Dr. Hansen’s background (see below). We are very excited to see Dr. Hansen’s vision help shape PSi in the coming years, and we are thankful to Dr. Hansen for volunteering her labor for this office at a difficult time. On behalf of the board, I am delighted to welcome her!
Very best wishes to you all,
Dr. Sean Metzger
President, Performance Studies international
Professor, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
Dr Pil Hansen
Dr. Pil Hansen built her first career as a dance dramaturg and manager in Copenhagen (Denmark) and Toronto (Canada), where she founded Acts of Memory Dramaturgy and co-founded Vertical City Performance. Today, she is an Associate Professor at the School of Creative and Performing Arts, University of Calgary (Canada). Her empirical and Practice-as-Research experiments examine memory, perception, and learning in creative processes for dramaturgical application. She works in collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams that cross artistic practice, scholarship, and science in the field of performing arts psychology. Hansen developed an approach to the analysis and notation of dynamical ‘Performance Generating Systems’, the dramaturgical toolset ‘Perceptual Dramaturgy’, and, with Bruce Barton, the interdisciplinary research model ‘3rd Space Research-Based Practice.’ She is currently co-developing dance programming for meaningful social inclusion of older adults in partnership with Kaeja (SSHRC- and Trillium-funded) and strategies for teaching interdisciplinary and networked performance creation online that are based on ADHD learners’ strengths (UCalgary-funded). At PSi, Hansen’s recent contributions include chairing the Dramaturgy and Performance Working Group and co-directing the 25th conference. Hansen’s scholarly research is published in TDR: The Drama Review, Performance Research, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Connection Science, Frontiers in Psychology, Theatre Topics, Canadian Theatre Review, Peripiti, Koreografisk Journal, MAPA D2, and sixteen essay collections. Hansen is primary editor of Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement (Palgrave, 2015) and Performing the Remembered Present: The Cognition of Memory in Dance, Theatre and Music (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017). She has dramaturged over 30 dance, devising, and interdisciplinary works, many of which have won awards and toured in Canada and internationally. Hansen is currently co-editing topic issues of Frontiers in Psychology, Performance Research, and Global Performance Studies, and is completing a monograph manuscript for Routledge on the dramaturgy and psychology of performance generating systems.