Elizabeth Doud

Lead Mermaid

 Elizabeth Doud is a Florida-based arts organizer and artist with a background in creative writing and contemporary performance.  She has over 20 years experience as arts presenter, producer and educator, with an emphasis on international cultural exchange, climate arts and language education. She is known as a tenacious advocate for new performance with a professional mission to facilitate climate arts and eco-justice activism.  She has worked extensively nationally, and in Latin America and the Caribbean in the performing arts, and co-created Climakaze Miami with FUNDarte in 2015, an annual climate performance and dialogue platform.  She led the Performing Americas Program of the National Performance Network from 2005-2018, and was the Artistic Director of the Cultura del Lobo Series at Miami Dade College from 2009-2011. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Miami and earned her Ph.D. in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil in 2018.   Since 2014, she has designed numerous idea forums on cultural collaboration and climate action, she was a 2017 visiting professor/practitioner at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights at the University of Texas in Austin and co-organized the HowlRound Challenge convening on Theater in the Age of Climate Change in 2018.  Her most recent touring project was an eco-performance entitled The Mermaid Tear Factory, was awarded a Knight Arts Challenge grant for new ongoing eco-performance in 2018, and will guest curate the Theatre in the Age of Climate Change series of HowlRound Theatre Commons for 2021.  In 2019, she became the Currie-Kohlmann Curator of Performance at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL..

When vigilante mermaids organize…things happen!

Siren Arts was organized in 2013 to create a container for a specific kind of performance practice that stands in relationship to the larger interdisciplinary study and activism around issues of the planetary climate crisis.  Siren Arts founder, performer, writer and arts organizer Elizabeth Doud has focused on developing performing arts events and activities as research that interrogate the role of performing artists as authors and mediums for systems change in this time of extreme and accelerated environmental collapse. Siren Arts uses performance to support ongoing dialogues about climate change, environmental justice and sustainable futures en la Florida. Through effective storytelling, Siren Arts’ mission is to build generative human networks in Florida and beyond which create awareness, positive action and greater empathy for other humans and other species.