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Sleep is often seen as a deeply personal, private act, but in the world of performance art, it has become a powerful medium for quiet resistance by feminist artists.

From a deserted beach to the lobby of a bank and even a family jail cell, women and nonbinary artists have chosen to sleep in unexpected places, inviting audiences to identify, interrogate and envision a political value for sleep.

This talk explores how feminist performance artists — including Laurie Anderson, Regina José Galindo, Sakiko Yamaoka, and Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa — have used sleep not just as a subject, but as a method. Through their work, sleep becomes a lens for thinking about time, care, endurance and the spaces our bodies inhabit. In this talk, Danielle Drees will explore how these performances expand our understanding of sleep — transforming it from a passive necessity into a site of expression, imagination and artistic inquiry.

This event is part of the public programme for the exhibition The Sleepers at The Women's Art Collection.

Â鶹ƵµÀ the speaker

is affiliated faculty in literature at Emerson College and a visiting lecturer on theatre at Harvard University. She received her PhD with distinction in Theatre and Performance from Columbia University and holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and Harvard College. Danielle's research examines how feminist, queer, disabled, and working-class artists use theatre and other aesthetic forms as sites of political experimentation. She is particularly fascinated by how feminist and and queer performers and playwrights have used sleep in their art to work through exhaustion and burnout and to imagine more sustainable forms of political action: her book Sleep with Spectators: Feminist Performance and Practice will be out from the University of Minnesota Press in September 2026. Danielle's next book project will be a biography of the 17th-century genderfluid performer Moll Cutpurse. Danielle lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. In her spare time, she talks about art with learners of all ages at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

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