Joanne Tompkins is Professor Emerita at the University of Queensland, Australia. She has published widely in theatre studies, especially on spatiality and theatre, and on cultural politics in theatre. She has won awards for her research and her editing, and the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies offers an editing award named in her honour. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Queen Mary, University of London in 2015 and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. She founded Ortelia, a company which provides virtual reality models of examples of cultural heritage, and she is a co-founder of AusStage (with Julie Holledge).