Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Leon J. Hilton is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, where he is also a faculty affiliate with programs in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Science and Technology Studies. He is the co-convener of Brown’s Disability Studies Working Group, launched in 2022 with support from the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of Counter-Cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which examines the cultural politics of neurodivergence across theater, documentary film, and performance art. His research and curatorial work focus on performance studies, disability studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and the aesthetics of risk, endurance, and vulnerability in contemporary art. He is currently an associate curator of the Performance Art Museum’s multiyear initiative on the history and legacy of High Performance, the first international magazine devoted exclusively to performance art. During his fellowship at the Cogut Institute, he will work on a new book project, The Vulnerability Artist, which examines how contemporary artists and writers mobilize vulnerability to experiment with different modes of aesthetic expression and political intervention. The project traces a genealogy of “vulnerability art” to explore how and why artists perform their own exposure to risk, danger, and sacrifice.