Amna Farooqi is a scholar of contemporary immersive performances that animate race, refugee hood, and colonial logics of spectatorship through frameworks of transnationalism and empire. Her research and teaching center critical refugee studies, Global South theatre, and performance ethnography.

She is currently working on her first book project, tentatively titled, Exposure after Empire: Aesthetics of Race and Migration in Immersive Minoritarian Performances of the 21st Century. Her writing has appeared in Ecumenica and will appear in the forthcoming edited collection Rehearsing Racial Equity: A Critical Workbook on Liberation, Repair, and More Just Art Worlds (2027, np press). Farooqi has presented her research at conferences including the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP), Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), and Performance Studies international (PSi). In 2024, Farooqi was honored with ASTR’s Helen Krich Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship.

As an educator, Farooqi builds global-minded community-centered scholars who activate critical and embodied engagements with texts and performances. She structures her classroom as a laboratory for rehearsing critical conversations about transnational and diasporic dramatic texts and performances as they intersect with race, imperialism, empire, migration, and refugeehood. Through dialogic lectures, embodied praxis, and guided self-reflection, her instruction inspires students to engage in questions of identity, place, and power. She has taught for the past five years across the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Crucially, Farooqi brings professional dramaturgical experience to her work. Before receiving her PhD, she worked professionally in the New York offices of WME and CAA, and at New York Theatre Workshop, where she managed the daily operations of a dynamic off-Broadway theatre.

Since 2023, Farooqi has managed conference organization for Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, an academic conference inviting interdisciplinary conversations across contemporary arts. From 2023-2024, she served as the Graduate Associate for the Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster: a large interdisciplinary cluster funded by the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities, where she supported the programming of invited lectures, local theatre viewings, and public artistic workshops. In 2022, UW’s Simpson Center awarded her a grant to cofound the “Critical Performance Writing Cluster,” a graduate research cluster that attended local theatre and fostered interdisciplinary discussions about live performance in Seattle.

Farooqi received her PhD in Theatre History and Performance Studies from the University of Washington (2026). She holds a BA from NYU Gallatin and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.