Dr. V Barratt (AKA Dr. Panic) (they/them) is a trans-media artist, researcher, writer and performer living on the unceded lands of the Kaurna people in Adelaide/Tarntanya, so-called Australia. V’s doctoral research had as its chaotic focus: panic, affect and deterritorialization, explored through performance, experimental poetics and queered affective vocalities.

V subscribes to the DIWO (Doing it With Others, Furtherfield) approach to art making and privileges co-creation as a productive and resistant modality. V resonates with M. Beth Dempster’s notion of “sympoiesis”, meaning, broadly, making-with in open systems of production. As a neurodivergent cryptoqueer elder and soil fancier, V honours all who are enmeshed in creative pursuits with them – trans-generationally, trans-materially, trans-temporally. V works with a number of accomplices in ongoing collaborations, including Francesca da Rimini as InTheInterior, Jesse Boylan and Linda Dement as BoneDirt and Ashley Heyward and Nick Taylor as Swamp Writing. As a founding member of the cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix, still active through occasional collaborations, V has been instrumental in developing critiques around gender and technology over three decades.

V has exhibited and performed and been published widely across their lifetime of making, doing and being. Their works have been performed and exhibited most recently in Adelaide, Sydney, Austria, New York, Los Angeles and France. Virginia has been widely published, including in: AXON, Cordite Poetry Review, Writing from Below, TEXT Journal, Banquet Press, Cordite, Overland, Plinth Journal, Artlink Journal and Offshoot: Contemporary Lifewriting Methodologies and Practice in Australasia.

V is working on their manuscript Beside Ourselves: Panic as Unbecoming.