Dr. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston is an anthropologist, performance theorist, and theatre director. She is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance and has graduate appointments in Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies and Social Anthropology at York University. Her research interests include experimental, imaginative, and performance ethnography; research-creation; autoethnography and memoir; ethnofiction; embodiment, emotions, and affect; migration, gender, and ageing; human rights; grief and mourning; political, activist, and devised theatre and performance; disability anthropology; and environmental anthropology.

Kazubowski-Houston has worked on performance ethnography projects with Romani communities in Poland and Canada, Nazi-Holocaust survivors in both countries, and low-income residents in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Her current research explores dramatic storytelling as an affective and reflexive ethnographic methodology for studying ageing, disability, migration, illness, grief, and loss.

Kazubowski-Houston is the author of three books: Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with A Romani Elder (McGill-Queens University Press 2025) , In Search of Lost Futures: Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality, Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography (co-edited with Mark Auslander, Palgrave Macmillan 2021), and Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women (McGill-Queens University Press 2010).

Randia’s Quiet Theatre won the Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research; two National Communication Association awards (the Ethnography Division’s Best Book Award and the Communication and Aging Division’s Outstanding Book Award); and the Association for Women in Slavic Studies’ Heldt Prize for Best Book in New and Innovative Scholarship. It also received Honourable Mentions for the Association for Feminist Anthropology’s Senior Book Prize, the Canadian Association of Slavists/Taylor & Francis Book Prize, and the (UAAC) Book Award, The Universities Art Association of Canada.

Staging Strife received both the 2011 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Outstanding Qualitative Book Award and the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Ann Saddlemyer Book Prize. 

Kazubowski-Houston co-edited a special issue of Anthropologica (“Performance, Ethnography and Imagination”) and Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies (“Transdisciplinary Travels of Ethnography”).

Her work has been published in various academic journals and edited volumes including Text and Performance Quarterly, Anthropologica, Canadian Theatre Review, Social Science & Medicine, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, A Different Kind of Ethnography (edited by Elliott and Culhane, University of Toronto Press), Anthropologies and Futures (edited by Salazar et al, Bloomsbury Press), Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry (edited by Denzin and Giardina, Routledge), and Experiential and Performative Anthropology in the Classroom (edited by Frese and Brownell, Palgrave Macmillan). Her article, “quiet Theatre: The Radical Politics of Silence,” was awarded the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) 2019 Richard Plant Prize, granted annually to the best English-language article on a Canadian theatre or performance topic. 

Kazubowski-Houston is currently writing a book of autofiction and a play on grief and traumatic loss.

She trained as a theatre director under the renowned Polish theatre and visual artist Józef Szajna. She has worked as a professional theatre director, performer, and playwright in both Canada and Poland.  

She is a co-founder of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (CIE), which won the 2019 American Anthropological Association General Anthropology Division New Directions Award. She is also a co-founder of the Emergent Futures CoLab (EFC) for transdisciplinary experimentation and collaborative future-making.