Elise Morrison
Elise Morrison is a PhD candidate at Brown University in Theatre and Performance Studies. Her dissertation, “Through the Looking Glass: Feminist Strategies in Surveillance Art,” looks at artists whose work strategically employs technologies and techniques of surveillance to create performances and installations that pose new and different ways of interacting with and understanding apparatuses of surveillance. By appropriating surveillance technologies from military, state, and consumer markets into public and private spaces of performance and interactive installation, these artists re-contextualize surveillance technologies and the power dynamics that historically attend them, provoking critical inquiry of the disciplinary function, performative possibilities, and human-technology interface of surveillance. Her work investigates intersections between surveillance art, surveillance culture, inter-media and digital performance, and feminist theory and performance.
As a practicing artist Morrison has also devised a number of works that explore the intersections between surveillance, performance, discipline, and feminism. Along with fellow graduate students Michelle Carriger and Molly Flynn, she created "Cabaret Murderess," an investigative piece of performance-research about the infamous Lizzie Borden, “Mirror Stage,” a cabaret about cameras, posing, and femininity, and several short films involving Lolita, Lizzie, and some fabulous paper dolls. She has also performed several surveillance art pieces on the public thoroughfares of New York, Providence and the INTERNET.
Morrison is also a regular contributor and, along with Ryan Hartigan, co-curator of Brown's very own late night Smoke and Mirrors Cabaret.
