Dr Sarah Peters (she/her) is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Flinders University and book reviews editor for Australasian Drama Studies. Sarah is a playwright and theatre practitioner specialising in verbatim theatre and community-engaged theatre making, most recently with youth arts organisations in South Australia such as D’faces of Youth Arts (2019), Expressway Arts (Carclew) (2019-2021) and Prospect Theatre for Young People (2022). She was a commissioned writer on STCSA’s and ActNow’s 2020 Ruby Award winning project Decameron 2.0, and Theatre Republic’s 2023 Future:Present project. Her verbatim plays (published online with Australian Plays Transform) engage with communities to tell the shared stories of experience, such as women living with Alopecia in bald heads & blue stars (2014), young people navigating mental health and wellbeing in twelve2twentyfive (2015) growing up in rural communities in Eternity (2017) and pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago looking for belonging in Blister (2019). Her research investigates collaborative theatre making processes within an ethic of care, dramaturgies of theatre based on lived experiences, and the socio-political and inter-personal outcomes of arts engagement for community participants. Through Sarah’s current work in progress An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Hugs she is exploring solo performance dramaturgies and this work has had public readings with South Australian Playwrights Theatre (2022) and the Adelaide Fringe (2023). Her co-authored monograph, Verbatim Theatre Methodologies for Community-Engaged Practice was published with Routledge in 2023.

Verbatim Theatre, Collaborative Theatre Making, Playwriting, Dramaturgy