Heath Pennington (they/them/their) is a PhD candidate and Chancellor’s Fellow in the

Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They

hold MA’s with Distinction in Gender Studies from Central European University and in

Performance and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Goldsmiths University of

London, and a BA in Theater and English Literature from the University of Southern

California (summa cum laude). Their ethnographic dissertation project examines how

consensual sensual and sexual embodiments within kink and BDSM (bondage and

discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) express and challenge

intersectional oppressions around gender, race, and class. Their interdisciplinary

research interests include affect theory, corporeality, environmentalism, feminism,

gender, performance, pornography, queer theory, sexuality, Shakespeare, and site-

specificity.

Having conducted field research in China, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia,

Netherlands, the Philippines, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, and the US, Heath is

an avid traveler. In addition, they are a certified intimacy professional, working to ensure

consensual interactions during portrayals of nudity and simulated sex in film and

theatre. As a sex educator, they have led seminars and workshops on topics such as

BDSM, rope bondage, non-monogamy, and the gender spectrum at venues from the

UCSB Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity to the Hong Kong Kink Con. At

UC Santa Barbara, they are departmental representative to the Graduate Student

Association, an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Public Humanities Graduate Fellow,

and a member of both the New Sexualities Research Focus Group and the Graduate

Scholars Program.

They have presented at over 10 conferences, including with the International Federation

for Theatre Research and the Society for Theatre Research New Researcher’s

Network. Their peer-reviewed articles “Rope Bondage and Affective Embodiments: A

rhizomatic analysis” (Corpo-Grafías 6.6) and “Kinbaku: the Liminal and The Liminoid in

Ritual Performance” (Performance of the Real E-Journal 1.1) are available on

ResearchGate.

View their website at HTTPS://ITSPLAY.WEEBLY.COM, their ResearchGate

at HTTPS://WWW.RESEARCHGATE.NET/PROFILE/HEATH_PENNINGTON, and their

IMDb at HTTPS://WWW.IMDB.COM/NAME/NM3227035/.