Shauna M. MacDonald is a scholar and performance artist committed to exploring sentient experience from a critical posthumanist perspective. Operating on the splice, she fuses cyborgology, the philosophy of technology, phenomenology, fluidity, memory, and homeplace. She believes in performance as public pedagogy and the cultivation of creative citizens.
Growing up on the folk-art, celtic music, storytelling-drenched island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, she was an avid writer and stubborn dreamer, a lover of the ocean and a chronicler of family sagas. With few opportunities to learn about performance art, she poured herself into performing with her school orchestras and audiencing local musical comedy troupes at Glace Bay's grand Savoy Theatre.
Shauna moved to Carbondale, IL in 2005 to enter the performance studies graduate program at Southern Illinois University. She has since completed an M.A. in Speech Communication, a Women's Studies certificate, and most recently a PhD in Speech Communication with an emphasis in Performance Studies. It was here, in the Marion Kleinau Theatre, that she fell in love with performance and began building a portfolio of solo, ensemble, and experimental work. She is a member of the Bureau of Artistic Resources Corporation, a performance collective based at SIU.
Her most ambitious pieces to date include VisceraFeed, a multi-media collaborative installation (created with Violet Juno, Nicole Defenbaugh, William Bowling, and Meagan Oestry) that explored bodily fluids and was featured in the exhibition BARCorp Presents, and Cybernetic Fruit: A Posthuman Fairytale, an experimental play co-conceived and directed with Nico Wood and written through devising with the CF Collective.
Shauna is currently preparing to move to the Philadelphia area to begin a new career at Villanova University. For the summer she still lives in Carbondale in the feminist house of wonder with her fabulous feminist roommate, where she also makes greeting cards and paper art. She also loves cooking, working out, and strolling through Carbondale with her pedagogical genius partner.