Elizabeth McQueen

• Website

Elizabeth McQueen is a scholar and writer from Seattle, Washington. She researches taste and performance, from contemporary performance art to wine fairs to sensory science labs with an attention to microbes and microplastics as key actors.

Her research is informed by performance studies, food studies, feminist science and technology studies, and sensory studies, coalescing around strands of new materialism. Her writing can be found in Gastronomica, Global Performance Studies, Theatre Journal, edited collections, and forthcoming in The American Historical Review and elsewhere. She is co-editing Sensory Dramaturgy, an edited collection on the senses in performance with Sean Metzger and Devon Baur. Her upcoming book project, provisionally titled Tastes of Performance, critically proposes terroir as a lingering analytic for the anxieties and aesthetics of contemporary consumption. 

She works as a dramaturg and curator for interdisciplinary performance works. Recent credits include MÁT MÁT MẮT by interdisciplinary artist Minh H. Phan (LA Times 2021 Restaurant of the Year, Michelin 2021, 2022) at High Desert Test Sites (2026), the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (2025), and Food Forward Los Angeles (2024). She has curated and served as a dramaturg for performances and events for poet Erin Marie Lynch, chef Martin Draluck, author Jim Franks, and others. She was the co-inaugural Artist in Residence at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington.

Invested in public scholarship, she has worked with organizations on public-facing research projects in food and environmental justice, including Los Angeles County’s Food Equity Roundtable, Mi Oaxaca, Irvine Ranch Conservancy, and S.C.O.P.E. She has given public talks on taste, performance, art and food with the Unfiltered Wine Festival, ASU’s Emerge Festival, The Geffen Playhouse, UC Davis Library, UCLA’s Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, and numerous film screenings. 

McQueen served as the 2024-25 Postdoctoral Fellow for the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at University of California, Davis titled Thinking Food at the Intersections: Justice and Critical Food Studies. With initial support from the Mellon postdoc, she produced 40+ episodes of the food studies podcast Esculent, with 6,000+ downloads, featuring leading chefs, artists, and scholars who engage with constructions of food, including Chef Martin Yan, food and agriculture scholar Professor Julie Guthman, and sensory science founder Professor Hildegarde Heymann. The podcast has appeared on multiple syllabi nationally and produced with support from University of California Humanities Research Initiative and Florida State University’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Center.