Diana Damian Martin is Senior Lecturer in Performance Arts at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

She is a mixed heritage Romanian-born academic, educator and artist working with performance as a practice and critical lens. She studied performance making at Central before moving on to complete a Masters in sociology of theatre and performance at Goldsmiths College and was a Royal Holloway and Bedford Excellence scholar at Royal Holloway, University of London where she completed her doctoral project, Criticism as Political Event, which explored transnational experimental critical practices that challenge established paradigms of critique through the lens of racial capitalism, colonial logics and abolitionist practice.

Diana's research sits at the intersection of performance, cultural and political philosophies. She is interested in border-work as a methodology of examining new political formations and anti-colonial imaginaries, be they through critical, political or artistic acts, feminist and queer modes of exchange and experimental cultures of critique, publishing and reflection. She also explores constructions of ‘Eastern Europe’ as they relate to movement, labour and aesthetic circulations, and emergent cross-border political grammars. She is also invested in modes of collaborative and cooperative practice across different ecologies of knowledge and art.

Biographical details correct as of 26.06.25