Claudia is a scholar-artist from Co.Clare in Ireland. Her doctoral research examines how ‘virtual women’ like female-gendered robots, avatars and Barbie dolls perform gendered and racialized scripts of embodiment and develop meaningful human-nonhuman relations. She has presented her work at venues such as the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Volkenburg Symposium at the Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival. Claudia is the recipient of the Herman Diedrich and Richard Johnson Families Scholarship and the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship from NU and the Arts and Humanities Council Prize from the University of Texas at Dallas. From 2023-2024 she will serve as the Graduate Assistant for the Public Humanities at the Kaplan Institute. She holds a First Class Hons. BA with a Gold Medal in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College, Dublin.

Claudia also maintains a creative practice and as an award-winning theatre maker has directed, written, and performed for numerous stages and companies in her native Ireland including Smock Alley Theatre, The Abbey Theatre, The New Theatre, The Samuel Beckett Theatre, and RTÉ Television. In her new home of Chicago, she has worked with Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Rough House Theatre, and the American Music Theatre Project. Claudia is passionate about practice-based-research and often bridges her scholarly and artistic pursuits through her creative work. She invites you to find out more about her work at claudiakinahantheatre.com.