Peggy Shaw is a performer, writer, and producer based in New York City. In 1980, with Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin, she co-founded Split Britches Theater Company, which has transformed the landscape of queer performance with its trademark vaudevillian, satirical, gender-bending works. Shaw also co-founded the WOW Cafe Theatre, a year-round festival of women's and transgender people's performance. Her recent solo performance, RUFF (2013), responds to her 2011 stroke and subsequent recovery, and also initiated the first ‘Public Service Announcement’ advisory film aimed at elders. The project also developed the Green Screening workshop methodology for survivors of stroke. Shaw has received two MAP Fund grants (2012, 2007), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2004), and numerous OBIE Awards. She was the 2014 recipient of the Doris duke Artist Award. In 2011, Michigan Press published A Menopausal Gentleman, a collection of her solo show scripts. She teaches writing and performance internationally and has worked with female prisoners in Brazil through the Staging Human Rights initiative. With Weaver, Shaw is currently devising Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), part-performance, part-conversation, exploring unmined potential in older people. UXO has been developed through residencies at the Barbican Centre, London and Governors Island, NYC, and has been presented as work-in-progress at La Mama ETC.


Portrait photo by Manuel Vason.