Bronwyn Stewart is a PhD candidate in English, studying feminist and queer performance practices in the late 20th-century. Her dissertation explores performances organized and structured around “The Gutter”—urban environs imbued with disgust and waste. With a dash of noir influence, her work follows artists into these spaces to investigate the intimate interactions staged between audiences and the inhabitants that often become subsumed in what we talk about when we talk about waste. She’s currently working on her second chapter which entertains the work of Stephen Varble, a self-described street person who took to the gutters of New York City in the most glamorous trash ensembles you’ve ever seen. When Bronwyn’s not doing research, you can catch her around town in her leopard-print jacket, performing her one-woman show Hughes of Grizabella or at the local coffee shop, sipping a cold brew and discussing the revolutionary potential of plastic surgery.