DASSIA N. POSNER is Assistant Professor  of Theatre History, Literature, and Criticism at Northwestern University.  For the past two years, she has been Assistant Professor-in-Residence in Theatre History and Dramatic Literature at the University of Connecticut and Dramaturg at the Connecticut Repertory Theatre.  She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard in 2009. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Drama at Tufts University and her B.A. in Theatre and Russian at Bates College. Her interests include Russian and European avant-garde theatre, history of directing, dramaturgy, women in theatre,  popular entertainment, and world puppetry history and performance.

Dr. Posner is a director, teacher, scholar, dramaturg, actress, and puppeteer. She is committed to scholarship informed by practice and to performance enhanced by historical context. Her work has been published in Theatre Survey, Slavic and East European Performance, Communications from the International Brecht Society, Theatre Research International and Puppetry International.  Articles and book chapters include “Performance as Polemic: Tairov’s 1920 Princess Brambilla at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre,” "A Theatrical Zigzag: Doctor Dappertutto, Columbine’s Scarf, and the Grotesque," “Spectres on the New York Stage: The (Pepper’s) Ghost Craze of 1863” (in Representations of Death in Nineteenth–Century U.S. Writing and Culture),  “An Alternative Theatre: Russian Women Pioneers in Puppetry,” and an English translation of a Russian Petrushka play. In her current research, she is preparing for publication her book manuscript The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and Russian Modernist Directors and is co-editing a collection on contemporary puppetry scholarship.  Future projects include a history of the Moscow Kamerny Theatre.  She is a contributing editor for Puppetry International.

Dr. Posner has taught at Tufts University, Boston University and Boston College and as an artist-in-residence in Dneperopetrovsk, Ukraine. After studying acting and directing at the Moscow Art Theatre School, she also worked as a simultaneous oral interpreter for the Stanislavsky Summer School in Cambridge, MA. Her directing credits include adaptations of stories by Nikolai Gogol and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as numerous large-scale pageants and parades. She has been a puppeteer for over a decade, performing in operas directed by Amy Trompetter at St. Ann's for the Children's Free Opera and Dance of New York; with Bread and Puppet, Underground Railway Theatre, the Puppeteer's Cooperative, Back Alley Puppet Theatre; and for First Night, Boston's annual New Year's parade. She is the founder of Luna Theatre, a visual theatre company that combines folk tales, traditional Bulgarian folk music and devised work, using masks and shadow puppets as expressive, creative forms.

Dr. Posner's work has been recognized with fellowships and grants from Harvard University, the Council on Library and Information Resources/ Mellon Foundation, the Somerville and Cambridge Arts Councils, the Boston Cultural Council, and Puppeteers of America. In 2003, she was featured on Boston Magazine's "Hot List" of visual and performing artists and, in 2009, was awarded the Order of Diaghilev for contribution to Russian culture.