QUEST SKY ZEIDLER

QUEST SKY ZEIDLER

 

Quest Sky Zeidler is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He earned his MA in Theatre Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his BA in Theatre Arts and History of Art & Visual Culture at the same institution. His research orbits queerness and monstrosity, sometimes investigating these concepts separately but more often analyzing how they inflect and constitute one another. He specializes in 20th and 21st century queer performance in the United States, with a particular focus on drag and lipsynch. He is interested in how queer performers, theatre artists, and audiences grapple with a mainstream media landscape dominated by paradigms of heteronormativity and cispatriarchy. He pursues research questions about how queer performance (and existence) is monsterized, and how queer subjects perform monstrosity in turn.

 

These queries course through his debut publication, “Revenge of the Monster Queer: The Cosmic Horror and Eldritch Possibility of Drag,” in Monstrous Utopias: Performance and the Radical Possibility of Hope, edited by Michael Chemers and Analola Santana (Routledge, 2026). This work was made possible through his recurring participation in the Monster Studies working group at the American Society for Theatre Research conference. He has presented his paper in progress “Sick in the Head: The Monstrosity and Camp of Dr. Anonymous” at the Horror Studies Working Group conference and for the Program in Cognitive Affective Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. Additionally, his chapter “‘I’m More True Than Real’: Transhumanist Prosthetics in Drag Performance” is forthcoming in a volume edited by María Gil Poisa and Débora Madrid Brito.

 

Quest has played many roles, both on and off stage, but he has found his calling as a director. He directed several productions in his time at UC Santa Cruz, including Lion in the Streets by Judith Thompson and Woyzeck by Georg Büchner. Most recently he served as assistant director to Danielle Rosvally on the UB production of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He eagerly looks forward to directing Polaroid Stories by Naomi Iizuka at UB in Spring 2027. He draws inspiration from Viewpoints, approaching directing in a highly collaborative manner with a flair for expressionism. He has worked in new play development at Mid America Theatre Conference, Theatricum Botanicum, Bay Area Playwrights Foundation, foolsFURY, and UC Santa Cruz.

 

Quest uses his personal projects to balance research communication and creative expression. He performs drag under the stage name Count Twinkula, putting his theories of monstrosity and queer performance into practice. His drag debut in October 2025 earned him the title of Champion Knight from Buffalo drag competition Rookie Knights. His monster research can also be found on his podcast, Ghosts Were People Too. Here he and his cohost Annabelle Bonebrake apply lenses of critical theory to depictions of ghosts in arts and media in order to tease out their cultural significance. These projects provide him with alternative modes of thinking through theories of queer monstrosity, and the means to share these ideas with wider audiences.