Catherine M. Cole is Divisional Dean of the Arts and Professor of Dance and English at the University of Washington. Her most recent book, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice (2020), is about dance and live art in contemporary South Africa and beyond. Previous books include Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010) and Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (2001). Cole has co-edited the book Africa After Gender?, as well as special issues of Theatre Survey on “African and Afro-Caribbean Performance” and TDR: The Drama Review on "Routes of Blackface.” Cole’s disability dance theater piece Five Foot Feat, created in collaboration with Christopher Pilafian, toured North America in 2002-2005.

With over 25 years of teaching and administrative experience, Cole has held previous positions as Chair at the University of California, Berkeley as well as Associate Director for Special Projects at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and Vice Chair of the Academic Senate at UC Santa Barbara. She has served as Executive Editor of the journal Theatre Survey and Vice President for Publications for the American Society for Theatre Research. Cole has received the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award, fellowships from the National Humanities Center Fellowship, Harvard Theatre Collection, and AAUW, and nominations for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize, ASTR’s Barnard Hewitt book award, and UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award. She’s also received grants from the Freie Universität Berlin, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fund for U.S. Artists, ELA Foundation, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.

See National Humanities Center Virtual Book Club event on Cole's most recent book.