I facilitate co-creative research on labour migration, mobilising performance as a collaborative praxis and an analytic lens.

A question I often return to is: ‘how does performance work?’ This question asks how performance creates meaning, brings about material change, and operates alongside other forms of labour. It leads me to explore how both theatrical and everyday performance are structured by power, and enables me to engage performance research as both analytic work and collective action. As such, I am interested in performance as a method of co-creative research, as well as an object of study.

Prior to joining King's I held a four-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, following a Visiting Scholarship at De La Salle University, Manila. My PhD, based on research in Singapore and Lebanon, was jointly awarded by King's College London and the National University of Singapore, and followed an MA at Goldsmiths College. I first encountered socially-engaged research as a teenager supported by Headliners, a London-based youth advocacy charity.

I co-convene the Performance Studies International (PSi) working group on Performance and Critical Social Praxis, and co-founded the research collective After Performance. I am an Associate Editor of Performance Research and regularly review articles for journals in theatre studies, anthropology and migration studies.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Migrant justice, anti-trafficking and performance
Gendered labour and crip critique under racial capitalism
Site-specific performance and spatial practices
Collaborative arts research, research ethics and institutional critique

My work is primarily concerned with feminist and crip approaches to questions of labour and migration as they are represented, negotiated, or challenged through performance. Engaging performance as a co-creative method, I have worked most extensively with migrant activist groups, particularly those led by domestic workers. My book Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work (Northwestern University Press) draws on a collection of soundwalks co-produced with migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. The book explores the creative expertise with which my collaborators navigated the intimate inequalities that condition their everyday lives, as well as reflecting on the intimate inequalities of research itself. 

Selected Publications

Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work (Northwestern University Press, 2025)

‘Unlearning: A Dialogue on Expertise, Activism, and Proximity to Whiteness’ with Letícia Ishibashi, forthcoming in Performance Pedagogies (Bloomsbury, ed. Diana Damian Martin, Eero Laine, Felipe Cervera, Theron Schmidt).

'Colonialism Reiterated: The Racialised Division of Labour in Higher Education and Beyond,' with Faisal Hamadah, Global Performance Studies 5.1 (2023), special issue on decolonisation, ed. Nesreen Hussein.

‘Immigration Infrastructure Theatricalised in Illegalised and The Claim’, Contemporary Theatre Review 31.4 (2021).

‘Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves? Listening to migrant domestic workers’ everyday temporalities’, Anti-Trafficking Review 15 (2020).

‘The Afterlife of a Walk: A Dialogue on the Possibilities of Anti-Racist Walking’, with Sharanya Murali, Contemporary Theatre Review, 30.4 (2020).

‘The Sea is Not a Highway: Performing Maritime Histories in the Not-Quite-Global City’, Theatre Journal, 71.4 (2019).

Teaching

I teach at King’s across contemporary performance and critical theory, with a particular focus on practice-research; performances of gender, race and disability; political and activist theatre; and critical theory and methodologies. I convene the practice-research module Performance Lab on the MA in Theatre, Performance and Critical Culture.

Expertise and Public Engagement

I work on social justice-focussed research in collaboration with experts-by-experience, primarily in the migrant justice and anti-trafficking sectors. This work has been featured by OpenDemocracy, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and BBC London News. In policy-focussed research, I have recently worked in coalition with the Voice of Domestic Workers, Kalayaan and After Exploitation on Survivor Futures, which aimed to inform evidence-led UK policy and frontline practice relating to the trafficking of migrant domestic workers.

I previously worked with partner organisation Kanlungan to produce two policy reports and a zine created by illegalised Filipino migrants in the UK in response to the impacts of COVID-19. With Dr Katharine Low, I co-hosted King’s Activist-in-Residence organisation Positively UK to produce Rebel By Default, a workshop series and exhibition on the power of women living with HIV. As a BBC New Generation Thinker I produced radio broadcasts on disability/crip justice, migration and domestic work. These were based on a collection of soundwalks that I co-created with domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. My research has won or been shortlisted for awards including the Times Higher Education Research Project of the Year, TaPRA Transformative Research and Early Career Researcher Prizes, Soundwalk September, and the PSi Dwight Conquergood Award.

Maya Esselmont

Research

Research

Survivor Futures

Research

Survivor Futures