Dr Molly Flynn

Overview

Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance and Subject Lead for Performing Arts and Creative Industries at Birkbeck. I teach across our BA and MA programmes in theatre and performance and I am the programme director for our new MA Documentary and Creative Practices now recruiting for 2027-28. Alongside my work as a researcher, teacher, and curator of theatre and performance, I am also an instructor of public speaking using theatre-based techniques to help my students across professions and disciplines to gain confidence, clarity and charisma in their professional communication strategies. 

My research considers the performing arts and creative industries as venues for social change with a particular focus on documentary forms. I am the curator and editor of the first anthology of full-length twenty-first century Ukrainian plays in English translation Ukrainian New Drama after the Euromaidan Revolution (2023) and the author of the monograph Witness onstage: Documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia (2020). My current project analyzes documentary theatre as a form of anticolonial resistance in the contemporary Ukrainian context as discussed in my 2026 chapter 'Ukrainian documentary theatre in the context of war' written with Ielizaveta Oliinyk and published in The Art of Witnessing: Documentary Literature, Film and Theatre in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States (2026).

In conjunction with my work as a researcher, writer and teacher I am also performer, producer, and curator of socially engaged theatre. In 2025 I produced a landmark event for our Centre for Contemporary Theatre with the renowned Palestinian theatre maker Hossam Madhoun entitled 'Art and censorship - an artist's journey from prison to exile'. Other curatorial work includes the Women and War project (2022) which supported the commissioning and translation of two short plays by leading Ukrainian playwrights Kateryna Penkova and Anastasiia Kosodii, as well as co-producing On the War at the Royal Court Theatre (April 2020). Molly is a co-founder of the US-based experimental theatre collective the New York Neo-Futurists (2004). 

Prior to my wok at Birkbeck I completed my PhD in Slavonic Studies at University of Cambridge (2016), my MA in Theatre and Performance at Brown University (2008), and my BA in Theatre and Russian at NYU (2006). 

ORCID

0000-0003-0569-4454

Research

Research interests

• Documentary Theatre
• Ukrainian Theatre
• Political Performance
• Cultural Memory
• War and Performance
• Public Speaking
• Oracy and Access
• Interdisciplinary Documentary Practices in the Creative Arts

Research overview

My current research analyses the development of Ukrainian arts activism since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2014. It combines textual and performance analysis with ethnographic and practice research methods to explore the artistic, social, and political significance of contemporary Ukrainian theatre practice and its relevance to western artists, activists, and policy makers. Drawing upon my work as a researcher, performer, producer, translator and curator, this long-term research project incorporates close collaboration with Ukrainian and UK theatre makers to illuminate the importance of Ukrainian theatre practice within a broader analysis of global political theatre practice. 

This research is in part what has drawn me to my most recent interest in documentary forms more broadly within the creative arts through which I am exploring the political and cultural potential of testimony, witnessing, and the performance of truth in today's mediatized world. This interdisciplinary project seeks to question how documentary functions differently across the creative arts and how artists, filmmakers, journalists and writers address and incorporate these themes and forms in their work particularly in the age of AI.

I am the curator and editor of the landmark anthology of Ukrainian plays in English translation Ukrainian New Drama After the Euromaidan Revolution (2023). My work work on Ukrainian theatre can also be found in the TDR article 'Class Act: East-West. Youth Theatre and the Making of Meaning in Postrevolutionary Ukraine' (2022). I am also the author of Witness onstage: Documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia (2020), and I have contributed chapters to the collections New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics, and Protest in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (2020) and Contemporary European Playwrights (2020).

 In April 2019, I co-organised the international symposium Depicting Donbas: Creative and critical responses to the war in Ukraine, a series of events which brought artists and academics into dialogue to explore the role creative practices play in times of conflict. The series included presentations from leading Ukrainian artists and scholars as well as two performances by the Theatre of Displaced People. 

Before arriving at Birkbeck, I worked as a post-doctoral researcher on the AHRC funded project For Love or Money? Collaboration between amateur and professional theatre, based in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Dance at Royal Holloway. My work on the project explored the impact of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages initiative.

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

I welcome inquiries from prospective PhD students with an interest in:

• socially engaged theatre and performance 
• testimony and witnessing in documentary creative practices
• contemporary Ukrainian arts and culture 
• oracy, access and education
  

Teaching

BA Teaching includes:

The Art of Public Speaking (Level 5)

Placemaking (Level 4)

Independent Research Project in Theatre Performance (Level 6)

Theatre in London Now: Student Led Project (Level 6)

MA Teaching includes:

Documentary Practices: Witnessing our World (2027-28)

MA Documentary Practices Final Project (2027-28)

Performing Texts (guest lecturer)

Narrative Medicine (guest lecturer)

Dissertation in Theatre and Performance Research (guest lecturer)

Publications