Keynote: Maria Shevtsova (Goldsmiths University of London) is renowned internationally for her research and scholarship on Russian theatre, past and present, contemporary European theatre directors and companies, and the interdisciplinary theories and methodologies of the sociology of theatre, which she has founded and which underpins her entire work. Her more recent books notably include Rediscovering Stanislavsky (2020), Robert Wilson (second, updated edition 2019), The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013, co-authored), Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre (2009), Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009), Fifty Key Theatre Directors (2005, co-ed), and Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004). She is also the author of over 150 chapters in collected volumes and articles in refereed journals. Her books and prominent chapters and journal articles have been translated into fifteen languages. 

Apart from keynote and other contributions to university conferences, acting schools and conservatoires (in English, Russian, French and Italian), Shevtsova gives public lectures at major international theatre festivals in Russia and across the world, and leads post-performance public discussions as well as conversations with theatre actors and directors, many in Eastern Europe. She serves on the juries of festivals (also as president of the jury of the Belgrade International Festival of Theatre, BITEF), and undertakes other outreach and multimedia activities that include radio and television broadcasts, and interviews in which she is interviewed (the UK and abroad), lectures in Russian theatres (also disseminated on YouTube, as by the experimental Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in Moscow), podcasts (including at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg) and online talks. She is the editor of New Theatre Quarterly and on the editorial teams of Stanislavsky Studies and Critical Stages, and on the Board of the Stanislavsky Research Centre.

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Responses by: Rose Whyman (University of Birmingham UK) and David Chambers (Yale University, USA)