This multimedia digital book asks thirty leading scholars from seven different countries throughout the Americas the same question: What is performance studies? Available online, this project features video interviews accompanied by short essays. The interviews are transcribed, translated, and subtitled into English, Spanish, and Portuguese, offering a truly trilingual perspective on performance studies that engages with it from a variety of national, linguistic, and disciplinary locations. Diana Taylor and Marcos Steuernagel's written introduction provides a history and overview of the project, while four brief essays by Steuernagel, Taylor, Marcela A. Fuentes, and Tavia Nyong'o offer critical entry points to the interviews from different yet complementary perspectives. What Is Performance Studies? expands the genealogy of the field while opening new paths for thinking through, in, and with performance studies in the Americas.

"Pedagogically, What Is Performance Studies? could function as a textbook for Introduction to Performance Studies classes as well as more focused seminars at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The keyword tagging system supports the reader’s use of What Is Performance Studies? as a reference guide. The bibliography makes it an excellent resource for future study."