Dr. Sarah Bay-Cheng is Professor of Theatre and the Helen and Paul Phelan Chair in Drama in the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Toronto. She also serves as the Academic Director for the BMO Lab for Creative Research Emerging Technologies.

She was previously Dean and Professor of Theatre & Performance Studies in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design (AMPD) at York University from 2019-2025. Her research and writing focuses on the intersections between theatre and media including histories of film, social media, and technology in performance. She is the author or editor of 4 books, including Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015) and Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010) as well as more than 100 academic essays, lectures and reviews. She also writes and gives talks on performance and media in popular culture, including film, social media, and sports. Prior to becoming Dean of AMPD at York, Bay-Cheng served as Chair of Theater and Dance at Bowdoin College (Maine, USA) and as the Founding Director for the Techne Institute for the Arts and Emerging Technologies at the University at Buffalo (New York, USA).

She was a founding co-host for On TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies podcast and still drops in on the conversation from time to time. Bay-Cheng frequently lectures internationally and in 2015 was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She has served as Vice-Chair of the Board for the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans and on the boards for the International Council of Fine Arts Deans, International Girls Ensemble (New York), and StageView.tv, among others.

Bay-Cheng is grateful for her liberal arts education at Wellesley College (A.B. with honours, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1996) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ph.D., 2001).