Upping the ante on dance coverage and conversation

Donate to thINKingDANCE this Giving Season!

Click here to make your contribution

Karl Surkan



 Karl Surkan is an educator, performing arts critic, cellist, cultural theorist, and freelance writer, based in Northwest Philadelphia and Boston. He has a Ph.D. in English with a Feminist Studies minor from the University of Minnesota and has been teaching primarily in gender and sexuality studies for the past 20 years in a variety of locations, including MIT, Tufts, UMass-Boston, Temple, and Swarthmore. His dance writing experience began in the 1990s in the Twin Cities cabaret scene, fostering a life-long appreciation of dance, experimental theater, and drag performance. His non-academic writing has been published in Newsworks, Patch, Pulse, The Minnesota Daily A&E (where he also worked as an associate arts editor), Focus Point, Lavender, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and mnartists.org. Academic publications include a dissertation on passing rhetorics and the performativity of gender identity, essays in The Drag King Anthology and Stieg Larsson and Philosophy, and more recently several auto-ethnographic pieces exploring intersections between trans identity, health care, and reproductive technologies.