Lucy Weir

I am a writer, researcher, and teacher, specialising in dance and performance studies.

I have published widely on dance, theatre, and live art. My first book, Pina Bausch's Dance Theatre, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2018. In 2021, I co-edited with Laura Bissell a collection of essays exploring the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on performance (Performance in a Pandemic, Routledge). My new book on self-injury in live art is forthcoming with Routledge. In 2020, I was selected as an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker, and I share my research through various programmes on BBC Radio 3.

I received my PhD in History of Art and Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow in 2013. I was Lecturer in Design, History and Theory at Glasgow School of Art from 2012-17. In 2015, I was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, before taking up a post at the University of Edinburgh. I was appointed Chancellor's Fellow in 2021.

I am a Visiting Lecturer in Dance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I offer weekly open-level classes in Floor Barre, and qualified as a matwork teacher, with the Pilates Foundation, completing my training under the guidance of Vanessa Smith.

Dance and movement practice have continually and fundamentally informed my research – I have always had the sense that I simultaneously inhabit two distinct but closely related worlds. In this next phase of my work, I am keen to find a closer point of connection between performance practice and analysis, narrowing the gap between my academic and applied interests in dance.