Phoebe Patey-Ferguson at Queer@Queen's 2026

Drama at Queen's, in association with Film Studies and Production @ Queen's, in association with the Outburst Queer Arts Festival is very proud to welcome Phoebe Patey-Ferguson to Queen's on Friday, 20 November 2026, to speak about her recent work on Queer Festivals. Please see below for more information. We'll look forward to seeing you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Kurt Taroff at k.taroff@qub.ac.uk.

Festivals as Queer Form

Festivals gather people into a shared temporality: touch, stare, breath, sweat, the conversations that emerge between bodies in festival intensities and intimacies, all of it conducted through a transgression of disciplines, thresholds, scenes and forms in unwieldy improvisatory combinations of flesh and fluid. They tend to burst forth over a few days, glimmer brightly, and vanish; lasting in the body as resonances of awe, desire, crushes, friendships, antagonisms, inheritances, and losses. International arts festivals have been building queer worlds since long before 1992, when It's Queer Up North became the first to claim the word, and the festivals that followed it such as Outburst have kept expanding what queer artistic expression can be, across performance, theatre, dance, film, visual art, drag and cabaret. Through multiplicity, complexity, plurality, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, festival form might be considered queer through weaving an open mesh of possibilities, much more than a container for queer art to occupy. 

Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is a Lecturer in Queer Performance at Rose Bruford College (Kent, UK). They specialise in the social contexts of contemporary performance and live art, focusing on queer and trans practices in festivals and nightlife. Their first monograph, The London International Festival of Theatre: Forty Years of Global Performances on Local Stages, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2027. Phoebe is founding editor of QPJ: A Journal of Queer Performance Research and co-edited a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on Live Art (2024). They co-convene the Queer Futures Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR), co-founded the Trans+Queer Working Group at Performance Studies international (PSi), are co-research lead for The Night Club: an international queer performance research network, co-founder of the Live Art Research Network (LARN) and co-chair of the board for Duckie.