Omid Mashhadi Abdolrahman is a scholar of performance studies as well as a theatre director and performance artist. In 2011, he founded and has since co-directed the research-based artistic group “Still Life” in Iran, which aims to merge the performing and visual arts, while adopting the theoretical achievements within disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, such as media studies, cognitive linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. His research interests centre on the interrelation between cultural transformations and the concepts of performativity, theatricality and mediality, both in literary-artistic productions and creative-subversive practices of everyday life. Against this backdrop, he investigated the effects of the mediality of online platforms on the contemporary landscape of critical literature for his MA thesis (entitled “A Study on the Impact of the Theatre Critiques and Reviews in Social Networking Websites on the Contemporary Performances in Tehran”). His PhD project grew out of his MA thesis, transferring and expanding the study of ‘literature outside the editorial hierarchies’ from the textual sphere of criticism to the Intermedial realm of performance, focusing on the political and cultural implications of amateurism in Performing Arts.

He was a Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities" from January to June 2021 and in October 2021 joined the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and the EXC "Temporal Communities", where he works as a doctoral researcher on the project "Counter Narrative Potency of Amateur Performance: An Aesthetic Strategy".

Associated Doctoral Research Project:

Counter Narrative Potency of Amateur Performance: An Aesthetic Strategy (2021–)

Fellowship Project:

The Role of Amateur Performance as an Aesthetic and Iconoclastic Counternarrative in the Reconstruction of Socio-Cultural Values (January–June 2021)