Feminist performance artist Deb Margolin is well known for her loquacious and witty performances. Most recently, however, her focus has been on the use of silence in her explorations of the failure of language in performance. In recent pieces such as Index to Idioms and O Yes I Will , Margolin challenges feminist ideas of absence as well as patriarchal standards of language through a reclamation of silence.

Playwright and performer Deb Margolin's contributions to contemporary American theatre over the course of her now 25-plus year career have been eclectic. In the 1980s and early '90s she performed with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver as the feminist performance troupe Split Britches, for which Margolin did much of the writing, based on the trio's improvisations and experiments. In the interstices of her work with Split Britches, Margolin built her own career as a solo performer and playwright. In her autobiographical Index to Idioms , premiered in 2005, and in conversation with Jill Dolan, Margolin addresses her process, politics, and pleasures in performance and playwrighting.

Deb Margolin and the late Hannah Wilke, along with other feminist artists, defiantly create fluid and intimate relationships between the self and the other in performance, and as such, create a space for us to see ourselves. Margolin and Wilke insist on the body in performance and find particular truths through the very personal experiences they reveal in their work. Both artists create a space for permeating the boundaries of identity; they ask only that we bear witness.