projects

The Digital Access Research Project (DARP) was launched in 2023 at metaLab (at) Harvard. It focuses on the future of the performing arts and the social and technological challenges brought on by the pandemic, concentrating on the digital accessibility of performing arts events and the codification of streaming as part of the disability laws in the US and globally. The research group consists of leading international experts in disability law, copyright law, digital technology, and performing arts management. The objective of the group is to develop a set of guidelines for policy- and lawmakers, and performing arts organizations that would balance the digital accessibility needs of formerly marginalized groups with the performer and institutional copyright rights.

The Theatre Times is an award-winning, global theatre portal. Since its launch in November 2016, The Theatre Times has published over 5,500 articles covering theatre in 90 countries and regions. With 32 thematic sections, more than 150 Regional Managing Editors, and over 60 international media partners, we have grown to be the most far-reaching and comprehensive global theatre portal today. Since we started, we have launched many innovative digital initiatives, including several special reports on the Impact of Covid-19 on Theatre Worldwide, Theatre and Decolonization, and Theatre and Artificial Intelligence.  The Theatre Times won numerous international awards, including a 2025 Webby Honoree, the 2024 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy from Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of Americas.

Transmedia Arts Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard considers the intersection of contemporary art/theatre and new media technologies, taking up immersive, multisite, and networked modes of transmedia storytelling, performances instrumentalizing a range of live and digital platforms and formats, including social media, augmented and virtual reality, haptic and digital technology, visual and audio mapping, human/AI interaction, algorithms, and bodily and sensory enhancements. Since its launch in 2019, the Seminar organized 45 lectures and panels. They are available online via open access.  

The IOTF is an annual or bi-annual event streaming international theatre shows via open access. It celebrates innovative global theatre artists working in diverse mediums and styles. Previous editions have included the work of acclaimed companies and theatres such as Complicité, Frantic Assembly, the Grand Teatre del Liceu, and Berlin’s Schaubühne. IOTF serves as a platform for encounters between international theatre and audiences. IOTF is free to participate and free to watch. Since its launch in 2019, the festival showcased over one hundred and forty theatre shows, from thirty six countries, with over a million people participating in the four editions. In 2021, IOTF was the second-place winner of the Culture Online International Award for “Best Online Project.” A total of 452 projects were submitted from more than 20 countries.

Performap.com is an interactive digital map of global theatre and performance festivals developed by The Theatre Times. Performap was funded in 2019 through Yale Digital Humanities Lab and LMDA Innovation Grant. With 340 international theatre and performing arts festivals, searchable by date, location, and type, Performap is the first extensive digital index of its kind in the field, built expressly for artists, audiences, critics, scholars, festival organizers, curators, and presenters from around the world. Performap also includes reports written by local writers and traveling reporters published by The Theatre Times.

Future Stage, launched at metaLAB (at) Harvard was an international initiative broadly concerned with the future of the performing arts: with the needs and possibilities for media, culture, and presence in a hyperconnected world; the civic stakes of the performing arts today; emergent modes and genres of performance and organization; the architecture of future performance spaces; and the future professions that will animate those performance venues.  A Manifesto for the Future Stage was published in 2021 and has since been translated into twelve languages.