Bio.
VK Preston is an Associate Professor at Concordia University’s Department of History. VK co-directs the Performing Arts Research Cluster (LePARC) at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology, also serving as a core member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.
VK is a Fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute and visiting artist-scholar at Bennington College’s internationally situated Dance MFA program. VK’s work connects performance, historiography, and visual literature with multidisciplinary artistic practice in video, drawing, photography, and print.
VK’s current research creation work, Between Water and Stone, addresses the stretched health care system during the Covid-19 pandemic with a particular focus on intergenerational relationships. As part of this body of research, first addressed through a lecture performance delivered as an April 2025 keynote on creative practices in history, VK has been writing a poetry cycle that serves as improvisation scores for collaboration with composers Valentina Plata and Kasey Pocius.
These works, shaped from field recordings, photographs, and spatialized sound compositions, are now in development at Concordia’s Visualization Studio. Several poems and photographs from this series, “Diptychs and Pieces of Loss,” appear in the Fall 2025 edition of The Iowa Review for the special issue “Bodies in and Out of Control” guest edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham.
After completing a Ph.D. at Stanford University’s Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, with a PhD minor in History, VK pursued postdoctoral fellowships at McGill’s Institute for the Public Life of the Arts and Ideas and the Sense Lab.
In 2019 they received a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for the project “New Directions in Seventeenth-Century Performance Research: Intangible Baroques” for work on histories of colonization, dance, and material culture. They are currently completing an academic book manuscript researching dance, colonization, and sovereignty in the long history of the witch trials.
Dr. Preston’s writing appears in Theatre Journal, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, Canadian Theatre Review, and History, Memory, Performance. VK’s “Baroque Relations: Performing Gold and Silver in Daniel Rabel’s Ballets of the Americas” (ed. Mark Franko, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment) received the 2018 Gertrude Lippincott prize for best English-language essay from the Dance Studies Association. VK’s article “Dancing the Kleptocene,” published in postmedieval, received an Honourable Mention for the Canadian Theatre Review’s Richard Plant Award in 2024. “Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis,” first published in Theatre Journal, received an Honourable Mention from the American Society for Theatre Research for the Gerald Kahan Scholars' Prize.
In 2014, Alanna Thain and VK Preston won the Richard Plant award for best article in English on a topic in Canadian theatre and performance studies for “Tendering the Flesh: the ABC’s of Dave St-Pierre’s Contemporary Utopias” in TDR / The Drama Review.
VK comes to performance scholarship by way of practice, following professional training in dance and theatre and ongoing, experimental histories of the performing arts in collaboration with contemporary artists. VK’s current writing projects include studies of art and performance entangled with the colonial invasion of the Americas, from baroque performance to performance art. Their current research includes cultural histories of performance and performativity, environmental humanities, the witch trials, race, critical dance studies, theatre, dis/ability, sexuality, and queer performance.
Areas of teaching specialization include performance historiography (1500-1850), new materialisms, affect studies, gender studies, settler-Indigenous studies, archive studies, dance, theatre, and performance studies, political theatre, queer theory, & dramaturgy.
VK is a fellow of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto. In 2016 VK received an Australian Research Council’s History of Emotions Project early career fellowship and a short-term research fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library.
They arrive in Montreal following positions at the University of Toronto (2016-2020) and as Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University’s Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (2015-2016).
EDUCATION
PhD, Stanford University
MA, SUNY Binghamton
BA, Concordia University
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