Niki Tulk
PhD, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Colorado Boulder; PhD, Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance, University of Colorado Boulder; MFA, The New School; M.Ed, University of Georgia; Dip. Ed, La Trobe University; BA, University of Melbourne
Niki holds two doctorates from the University of Colorado Boulder: in Theatre and Performance Studies; and in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance, and she is a certified teacher of Ruth Zaporah’s improvisation method, Action Theater™. Niki’s research explores a feminist, embodied and ethical poetics around the performance of trauma experience, and her book, Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming will published by Routledge U.K. in 2022.
In Australia, Niki studied Literature, Music and Theatre-Making at both the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts, where she also worked extensively in youth, education and community theatre. Niki has a M.Ed from the University of Georgia, and a M.F.A. from The New School. While in New York City, Niki taught practice-based research to undergraduate artists at Parsons School of Design, and directed a multi-year project theatricalizing Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons at Theater for the New City. Other works include directing Amelia Roper’s She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange (square product theatre company), and assistant directing Equivocation by Bill Cain (Colorado Shakespeare Festival), and touring a co-devised piece exploring stigma around PTSD, to Australia. Niki was awarded Best Director/Designer for Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice (CU Boulder), which won seven Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Merit awards including design concept, direction and performance mentor. Her most recent installation and solo work explores violence against women through the material practice of writing and book-making, focusing on the macabre, 19th century practice of binding texts in female, human skin; her solo piece Ophelia|Leaves played at the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts, Winston-Salem, NC, as well as in the ATLAS Black Box Experimental Studio in Boulder.
As a writer, Niki has published poetry, fiction, and criticism in multiple journals, including Emergency Index, The Saranac Review Tenth Anniversary Edition, The Sheepshead Review, The Feminist Wire, The Journal of Language and Literacy Education, The West Trade Review, Across the Margin, Southerly and Antipodes. Her novella Before Rain was a finalist for the 2017 international Miami Book Fair/deGroot Prize. She was Fiction and Blog Editor for Antipodes: Journal for Australian and New Zealand Literature for several years, and is co-founding editor of PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research. Niki is the winner of the 2021 Driftwood Poetry Book Prize, and her full length work, O, will be published by Driftwood Press in 2022.
Prior to coming to Plymouth State University, Niki was Director of Theatre at Alfred University, NY, where she created a rebel circus version of Molière’s Tartuffe and directed/co-created an installation/video production of Suzette Who Set to Sea utilizing augmented reality, by Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer. Niki currently serves as President of Women & Theatre Program for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Her international, collaborative arts practice combines physical improvisation, music/sound, material and language-based poetics—and occasionally (and importantly) a custom-made, re-pluckable chicken.
