Erika Fischer-Lichte was Professor of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 1995 to 1999 she was President of the International Federation for Theatre Research. She is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Academy of Sciences at Goettingen, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina at Halle. She was director of the International Research Centre for Advanced Studies on 'Interweaving Performance Cultures‘ (2008-2022). She has published widely in the fields of aesthetics, theory of literature, art, and theatre, in particular on semiotics and performativity, theatre history, and contemporary theatre.
Among her numerous publications are The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008), The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism (2014, ed. with S. Jain et al.), Tragedy’s Endurance. Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany Since 1800 (2017), Entangled Performance Histories. New Approaches to Theater Historiography (2023, ed. with T. Jost et al.), Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures (2023, 2 vols., ed. with T. Jost et al.), and The Routledge Companion to Performance-Related Concepts in Non-European Languages (2024, ed. with T. Jost and A. Schenka).