Romanska’s TheTheatreTimes Honored for Scholarly Excellence

TheTheatreTimes.com, an open-access global theatre and performing arts portal founded by Performing Arts Professor Magda Romanska, won the 2024 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR).

The joint award is given each year to an individual or team that demonstrates innovation and rigor in the use of electronic/digital media for the purpose of producing and disseminating knowledge about theatre and performance.

In addition to offering theatre news and criticism, TheTheatreTimes provides services such as Performap, an interactive digital map that tracks international theatre festivals around the world in real time.

“We decided as a committee to give this year’s award to TheTheatreTimes.com, a mostly self-funded digital portal that seeks to globalize theatre criticism by challenging unequal modes of sharing and accessing knowledge,” the ATHE-ASTR award committee wrote in a statement. “We appreciate their collaborative and decentralized model and the wide range of open access content, especially that which offers coverage for underrepresented regions and people.”

Since launching in November 2016, TheTheatreTimes has published more than 5,300 articles and theatre reviews covering performances from around the world. More than 150 Regional Managing Editors and over 60 media partners contribute to the site. In addition to Performap, the site offers IOTF: The International Online Theatre Festival, an annual event streaming international theatre productions.

TheTheatreTimes’ IOTF was the runner up of the 2021 Culture Online International Award for Best Online Project. It also received the 2018 Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas.