Assistant Lecturer
Dr. Niki Tulk is an Australian/American, certified Action Theater™️ teacher, inter/multidisciplinary artist, improviser, theatre-maker, director, writer, scholar, and poet. She is Autistic and ADHD (AuDHD), and is also a teacher trainee in the Alexander Technique and Level 1 IFS (Internal Family Systems) certified. Her work bridges movement, performance, language, and embodied improvisation, with a focus on cultivating presence, creativity, and responsive communication through live performance practices. Niki is certified to teach Action Theater™️, the improvisational performance form developed by Ruth Zaporah, which integrates movement, sound, and language as a practice of embodied spontaneity and presence — a training that grounds much of her approach to devising, performance, and pedagogy. She has taught workshops and directed ensembles across professional theatre settings, universities, communities, and site-responsive landscapes in Australia and the United States, and is now based in Cork, where she teaches theatre at Munster Technological University.
Her directing and performance work includes a New York City production of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein, a solo performance exploring the psychic landscape of Ophelia presented at festivals in the United States, and an original work examining non-combat-related PTSD that was performed in Australia.
Dr. Tulk holds two PhDs from the University of Colorado Boulder: in Theatre & Performance Studies, and in Intermedia Art, Writing & Performance. Her experimental poetry book O, winner of the Driftwood Poetry Prize, explores the stories we craft around violence, womanhood, and justice (Driftwood Press, 2022). Her monograph Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming (Routledge, 2022; paperback 2024) explores a feminist, embodied, and ethical poetics around the performance of trauma experience. She has also published multiple articles, short stories, and poems.
Niki studied Literature, Music and Theatre Making at the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts, holds a Master's in Education from the University of Georgia, and an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, NYC, where she also taught practice-based research to undergraduate artists at Parsons The New School for Design. Prior to Cork, she trained actors and theatre makers at Emerson College and Boston University.
Rooted in mythopoetics, somatics, and ecofeminist thought, Niki’s teaching helps artists, educators, and students fall in love with their own genius to create transformative art.