Trained as an early modernist, Lindsey Drury is an historian and performance studies scholar who works on dance, colonial history, and the ethnological archive. She holds a PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin and University of Kent-Canterbury and currently works as a Postdoc within Critical Dance Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she researches, teaches, and organizes the Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship program. She is the 2022 Honorable Mention for the Gertrude Lippincott award for best article in the field of dance studies. Recent awards include a research fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek, and an Irene H. Chayes Travel Grant. For her postgraduate research, she was awarded an Erasmus Mundus PhD Fellowship (2015-2019), mobility grants from the German Academic Exchange Service / Bundesministerium für Bilding und Forschung (FUBright), and a Graduate Research Fellowship at the University of Utah (2007-2008). Along with Nina Tolksdorf, Drury guest edited a special issue of the journal Interface Critique, “Conversing the Book”. Recent articles and book chapters include “The Circumpolar North, Indigenous Art, and Settler Aesthetics of Remoteness” (2026), “A Historiography of Face, Race, and Interface in Media Theory” (2025), and “Cannibal Choreographies: Anthropology, Anthropophagy, and Modernist Dance in the Americas” (2025). She has been a guest speaker in many contexts, including at the Universität Hamburg, Sorbonne Université, the University of Kentucky, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). She has been a guest researcher at the Warburg Institute and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (Paris).  

Drury has danced improvisational scores of “Bessie” and Guggenheim award-winning choreographer Yvonne Meier and performed as a guest artist in the work of La Pocha Nostra led by MacArthur “genius” awardee Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Her artistic practice has been supported by the European Cultural Foundation, Queens Art Fund, the Brooklyn Arts Council, and through residencies at Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Gibney Dance, and Cora Dance in New York City. Her works have been presented at the Queens Museum, St Mark’s Church, Issue Project Room, Judson Church, ZK/U Berlin, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Momenta Art, Chashama, and elsewhere. Drury’s performances have been featured internationally in Budapest, Berlin, Cologne and at the University of the Arts Helsinki and Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexcio. Her performance works have been called “performance from an unknown civilization” (Hyperallergic), “compelling new performance” (Huffington Post), and as “staging the death of patriarchal modernism” (PAJ, MIT Press). 

Drury has been a co-organizer of workshops and conferences on the history of the body, decolonization and artistic, research, and digital arts, humanities, and theories. She co-coordinates the Nordic Summer University study circle Studies in Remoteness: Sensoria of Absence, Distance, and Neglect. Previously, she co-coordinated, “Praxis of Social Imaginaries” through the Nordic Summer University, focusing on collaborative and community-based research practices of the textual history and European legacy of otherisation. She curated the first series on Post-Dance (Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival), curated an exhibition of the work of the 90’x Collective (Tbilisi) and presented an evening with artist Chloë Bass (NYC). Drury sat on the board of the Association for Performance Art Berlin until the organization was dissolved in 2022. Previously, she co-founded the Woods Cooperative (an artist-run rehearsal and performance space in Queens) and initiated the feminist working group No Wave Performance Task Force (2012-2018). Collaborators have included Sima Ehrentraut, Nina Tolksdorf, Esther Neff and Brian McCorckle (Panoply Lab, NYC), Lichen Bouboushian (Chicago/Austin), Matthew D. Gantt (NYC), No Collective (Japan/USA), Samira El Khadraoui (croxhapox, Belgium), and Joël Verwimp (Berlin).