Lois is an artist, writer, director, and activist who has performed and lectured extensively across five continents. Her research interests include live art, solo performance, feminist and lesbian theatre, ageing, performance and human rights and the relationships between performance and public engagement. As part of her current research interest in the staging of ageing bodies Lois has co-written and directed Peggy Shaw’s Ruff, an exploration of issues of memory, personal response to extreme circumstance and the place of the imagination in the neuroscience of memory loss and structural damage; her latest solo performance What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex is a practice-based project that collaborates with older adults through interviews, performance workshops and public presentations to research the effects of ageing upon people’s desire for, and ability to, obtain sexual pleasure and intimacy.

Lois co-founded Spiderwoman Theatre, Split Britches, and the WOW Theatre in New York; she was also the Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop Theatre and the AiR Supply Collective in London and Director for PSi#12: Performing Rights, an international conference and festival on performance and human rights held at Queen Mary in 2006. Lois has been a Hunt Scammon Distinguished Artist at William and Mary College, a Penny Stamps Distinguished Lecturer and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and visiting artist at universities including Harvard, Wellesley, UCLA and Universites of Texas and Tasmania. In 2014, she was made a Guggenheim Fellow. Lois’ long working relationship with PPP has seen her partner on Staging Human Rights, a 2001-5 project that used performance practice to explore human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the UK; and be a visiting artist in London Occupation Rio during 2013. In 2018, we are partnering Lois to support aspects of the delivery of her research on ageing and the aftereffects of stroke under a Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellowship.