Helena Grehan

Professor Helena Grehan is Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Edith Cowan University. Since joining WAAPA in February 2024, she brings more than two decades of leadership in theatre and performance studies, ethics, and digital cultural heritage.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy (Theatre Studies), Murdoch University, 1999

Research Interests

Professor Grehan’s scholarship interrogates how contemporary performance, installation and digital arts negotiate ethics and responsibility. Through critical frameworks spanning climate disaster preparedness, post-digitisation futures for vulnerable HASS collections, and the politics of spectatorship, her work connects creative practice with urgent societal challenges. Recent projects explore how extreme weather events reshape artistic practice and how digital technologies can safeguard—and re-imagine—cultural heritage.

Publications & Trends

Across 2021–2024, Grehan’s output has clustered around four inter-related themes: climate futures, cyber-physical aesthetics, listening ethics, and activist dramaturgy. Book chapters and journal articles repeatedly deploy performative methodologies to examine how art mediates ecological crisis, political refusal, and community resilience, signalling a scholarly trajectory that merges critical theory with applied creative research.

Awards & Recognition

• Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2023)
• Australasian Drama Studies Association Joanne Tompkins Prize for Editing (2021)
• Murdoch University Vice Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished and Sustained Achievement in Research (2019)
• Marlis Thiersch Research Award (2011)
• Rob Jordan Book Prize (2010)
• Murdoch University Vice Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award (2008)

Doctoral Supervision & Grants

Grehan has successfully supervised over 20 HDR candidates to completion and currently leads three doctoral projects as principal supervisor, alongside one as associate supervisor. She is Chief Investigator on the ARC Linkage project Life after Digitisation: Future-proofing WA's Vulnerable Cultural Heritage (AUD $1.13 M, 2022–2027), collaborating across performing arts, information science and climate humanities.

Labs & Teams

At WAAPA she anchors a growing research cluster on Performance, Climate & Digital Futures, convening interdisciplinary teams across performance, design, screen, and digital humanities to prototype new models of creative practice and cultural preservation.