Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and is a Faculty Affiliate in History of Art, Art Practice, and Berkeley Center for New Media. She currently co-leads three major research projects at UC Berkeley 1) as Faculty Director of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative 2) as co-PI of the Cities of Awe Lab, with Dacher Keltner, and 3) as co-PI of A Counter Imaginary in Authoritarian Times, with Judith Butler and Debarati Sanyal.
Jackson’s research focuses on two overlapping domains: 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent books are Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection (Thames & Hudson, 2022). Her previous books include The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (M.I.T. Press, 2015), Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, co-edited with Johanna Burton and Dominic Willsdon (M.I.T. Press, 2016), Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge, 2011), Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (2000) and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004). Other collaborative projects include the guest-edited Valuing Labor in the Arts with Art Practical; a special issue of Representations on time-based art (with Julia Bryan-Wilson); In Terms of Performance,(link is external) an online platform of keywords in experimental art and performance created with the Pew Center for Art & Heritage; and Media Art 21,(link is external) an online database and exhibition platform, co-edited with Zhang Ga and Rudolf Frieling. Recently, she hosted Relevance of Place,(link is external) a series of online, site-specific dialogues about art, ethics, and landscape at Tippet Rise Art Center. Jackson’s writing has appeared in dozens of museum catalogues, journals, blogs, and edited collections.
Jackson has been a plenary speaker at a variety of distinguished venues, including the Freie Universität in Berlin, the Universität der Künste [typo] in Berlin, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Art as Forum in Copenhagen, the Malmo Community Biennial, the Environment Forum at Harvard University, the Venice Biennial, the Gotenburg International Biennial, ArtCOP21, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the PUBLIC Theater, Tate Modern, Creative Time, the Sorbonne, the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, Open Engagement, the Ibsen International Festival in Oslo, the Blaffer Museum, The Kitchen, Cooper Union, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Nord, the Yale School of Drama, and many other universities and art organizations. In 2025/26, she was invited to be a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar,speaking at several colleges and universities around the country. She has organized dozens of conferences, symposia, public lecture series, and artist residencies with Environmental Arts and Humanities, the Kramlich Art Foundation, Tippet Rise Arts Center, the Berkeley Arts + Design Initiative, the Arts Research Center, the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, Art Practical, Cal Performances, BAMPFA, Open Engagement, The Builders Association, Touchable Stories, American Society of Theatre Research, the American Studies Association, the Women and Theatre Project, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Multi-campus Research Group on International Performance, UC Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation, and with the civic governments of Berkeley, San Francisco, and Richmond, California.
Jackson has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Performance Studies (NCA), the ATHE Best Book Award, Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Kahan Scholar’s Prize in Theatre History (ASTR), and the Berkeley Arts and Humanities Outstanding Service Award, the Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jackson has received major collaborative project grants from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, UCIRA, the Creative Work Fund, the San Francisco Foundation, the LEF Foundation, the Kramlich Art Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Gambrell Foundation.
In the domain of campus and public service, Jackson has held several roles, including founder of the Ph.D. in Performance Studies (1999-2006), Department Chair of TDPS (2006-2010), Director of the Arts Research Center (2010-2016), Member and Chair of the campus Budget Committee (2010-2014), Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design (2015-2021), and Department Chair of History of Art (2023-2026). Jackson also serves as Chancellor’s Designee and Trustee for BAMPFA, as founding Trustee and Program Director for the Kramlich Collection and Kramlich Art Foundation, as Program Advisor for the Tippet Rise Art Center, as a Visiting Creative for Art + Water, as founding Trustee of the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, and as Expert Evaluator in Arts and Culture for the European Research Council. She previously served on the boards of the UC Berkeley Foundation, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Cal Performances, the Oakland Museum of California, the UC Institute for Research in the Arts, The Crucible, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and as a Cultural Commissioner for the City of Berkeley.
Before moving to UC Berkeley in 1998, she received a B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1989), a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University (1995). Jackson served as an Assistant Professor of English and Literature at Harvard University from 1995 to 1998.