The Professor: A Performance Persona

The Professor emerged from a red satin robe, a fake cigarette, and a pair of oversized red Velcro curlers discovered in my mother’s closet. When I first put them on, the transformation felt both unexpected and inevitable. It was an inherited image of femininity, domesticity, and glamour became the costume for a new persona.

The Professor is an elegant, flirtatious, and unapologetically excessive academic who offers advice with absolute confidence; whether or not anyone should follow it. She drinks, smokes, retreats to her bathtub for the privacy she rarely finds elsewhere, and speaks the truths that polite professional life often asks us to hide.

Part performance, part fictional archive, and part cultural critique, The Professor explores the contradictions of academia, motherhood, femininity, and public identity. She embodies the parts of ourselves that are carefully edited out: the frustrations, desires, absurdities, and private thoughts that exist beneath the performance of competence.

The Professor does not simply enter the stage; she emerges from an archive of objects, memories, and imagined histories. Before each performance, she “comes out of the closet,” returning to the robe, the curlers, and the artifacts that make her possible.

Through live performance, storytelling, archival media, and fabricated ephemera, The Professor creates a space where authority becomes unstable, advice becomes questionable, and honesty becomes its own form of performance.

Available formats include:

• Performance lectures

• Live storytelling and character-based performances

• Archival media and 16mm film interventions

• Artist talks and conversations

• Installations and performance-based exhibitions

Emerging from inherited objects, questionable wisdom, and the contradictions of academic and domestic life.