Niki Tulk
Niki Tulk is an Australian writer, cellist and theater-maker based in the US, currently a PhD student in Theater and Devaney Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. Niki Tulk studied Literature and Theatre Making at both the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts, Australia, where she also directed and performed with St Martin’s Theatre, Australian Nouveau Theatre and Danceworks. As a long-time high school Drama and English teacher, Niki gained her Masters in Education from the University of Georgia, where she also ran theatre and creative writing workshops with at-risk teens for the Athens-Clarke County School District. Having worked for over a decade as a Theatre Teaching Artist, as well as creating and directing multimedia pieces in abandoned warehouses and other unclaimed spaces, Niki received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School, New York City, and for three years taught writing to undergraduate artists at Parsons The New School for Design. In addition to directing a multi-year, off-Broadway production of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, she has published poetry, fiction, dramatic and literary criticism in Emergency Index, The Saranac Review Tenth Anniversary Edition, Rock River Review, The Sheepshead Review, The Feminist Wire, The Journal of Language and Literacy Education and Antipodes—for which she is upcoming fiction editor. Niki’s debut novel Shadows and Wings—a novel exploring the legacy of World War Two on successive generations and across two hemispheres—was published in April 2013; Claire McAlpine (book blogger and freelance reviewer for the Guardian in the UK) picked it as one of her top ten reads of 2013; Niki is represented by Martin Shaw from the Alex Adsett Literary Agency. Her research interests lie in both creating and examining theatrical work that exists at the juncture of spatial/design theory, feminist material poetics and embodied text, to cultivate empathy and positive social change. Niki has been studying with Ruth Zaporah (Action Theater) for several years and makes work utilizing a post-dramatic aesthetic. And, occasionally, a custom-made, re-pluckable chicken