Dassia Posner
Affiliated Faculty, Theatre
Dassia N. Posner is a theatre historian who specializes in the twentieth-century Soviet avant-garde, the history of stage directing, translation, dramaturgy, and puppetry. Her core archival research reclaims the legacies of Soviet-era stage directors whose innovations were distorted or erased in the Stalin era in ways that still impoverish international theatrical practice.
Posner is author or co-editor of five books. The most recent, The Actor’s Revolution: Art and Politics at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre (Northwestern University Press, 2026), draws on a decade of archival research to reclaim the lost history of the Moscow Kamerny Theatre and its innovators, Jewish-Ukrainian-Soviet director Alexander Tairov and Alisa Koonen, a Moscow-born actress from an immigrant family. This work builds on her first monograph, The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde (Northwestern University Press, 2016; shortlisted for the 2019 Prague Quadrennial Best Scenography Publication and 2017 TLA George Freedley Memorial awards), which investigates how experimental directors Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein reinvented the rules of theatrical practice by building on the fantastical tales of German romanticism. Posner has also co-edited three books: Making Meaning in Puppetry: Materials, Practice, Perception (Routledge, 2025; Winner, 2026 UNIMA-USA Nancy Staub Book Award; shortlisted for the 2026 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize and 2026 ATHE Excellence in Editing Award); Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev (Indiana University Press, 2021; Winner, 2022 ASTR Translation Prize; Runner Up, 2022 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize; Honorable Mention, 2022 ATHE Excellence in Editing Award), and The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (Routledge, 2014), the first major international collection of puppetry scholarship.
Recent creative scholarship includes production dramaturgy at Steppenwolf Theatre Company for Seagull, Grand Concourse, Russian Transport, and Three Sisters, for which she was also Tracy Letts’s dramaturgical translator, translating Three Sisters for a film directed by Monika Gossmann, and co-directing puppetry performances at Northwestern.