Dr Elena Knox is a performance, video and installation artist, and a scholar in the FTS (feminist technoscience studies) field. She is engaged in challenging the encoded performativity of gendered technologies, and their related epistemologies and aesthetic logics. She looks at cultures of kitsch, drag, queering and futurisms in intimate collocation with mainstream cultural product and performance, in order to question rationalist, culturally inherited assumptions about what is believed to be possible.

Knox’s PhD built a pioneering practice-based analysis of the aesthetic evolution of the service gynoid, winning the 2015 UNSW Art & Design Postgraduate Award for Research Excellence. Her BA Class 1 Honours project investigated the phenomenon of Pop Idol as it manifested in Baghdad in the low budget, locally produced Iraq Star.

Knox’s works are shown in theatres, cinemas and festival venues internationally, including Athens Video Art Festival, Cairo Video Festival, CologneOFF, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) Hong Kong, K11 Art Mall Hong Kong, Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlin, Sydney Opera House, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Façade (Plovdiv), Sydney Underground Film Festival, St Kilda Film Festival, Sydney and Melbourne Writersʼ Festivals, The Box Visualcontainer (Milan), Women and Theatre Program (New York), Centre for Performance Research (UK), Australian Poetry Festival and Art Currents (USA). She has received project grants from four discipline boards of the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Embassy Berlin, and was awarded the Videotage/FUSE residency in Wuhan, China.

As an actor Knox has appeared for La Pocha Nostra (Mexico/USA), and in Jane Campionʼs Holy Smoke. She has written, performed and produced four innovative experimental electro-cabarets, including the Green Room Award nominated Bild-Lilli at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne. She performs in electronic pop duo Actual Russian Brides, and co-directs production house Lull Studios in Sydney and Berlin. She has published poetry in Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA, some of which was selected for the syllabus of the University of Oxford literature summer school.