Search

Present

  • Completed a PhD research in social theatre around the topic of play/playful tactics in activist performance practices (2022).
  • Working as a social theatre practitioner with Theatre in Flow, a theatre company committed to championing marginalised voices, Rochdale, Greater Manchester (2022)
  • Visiting lecturer, teaching ‘Performance Activism’ as a 3rd year specialism course at the University of Manchester (2021)
  • Visiting lecturer on the MA Applied Theatre course at the University of Warwick (2021 and 2022)
  • Legislative theatre project: working with a group of practitioners on methods in legislative theatre (a political theatre format that involves policymakers in a forum performance, to bring about new policy and legislative changes around specific issues). Funded by Arts Council UK, led by Katy Rubin (TONYC), with Dan Boyden (The Change Collective ) and Gavin Crichton (Active Inquiry)
  • Current points of interest: forms of creative disobedience in activism; playful strategies in protests; the importance of laughter in spaces of tension.
  • Recently published an academic article calling for more activist-researchers in social theatre, and for our work to be more aligned with/serving the communities, activists and artists we study: Disrupting the hierarchy of knowledge production: the case of documenting social theatre in Palestine - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682761.2021.1888565 [this is open access] 
  • Recipient of the New Scholars' Prize 2021, International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR)
  • Recipient of Emerging Scholar Award 2020, Common Grounds, Arts in Society Research Network.
  • Currently setting up a UK network of performance & activism: bringing together scholars and performance makers around activism (get in touch if interested).
  • Worked as a research consultant for In Place of War (funded by AHRC) to evaluate the long-term social and economic impact of support for grassroots arts groups in places of armed conflict and political violence (2020).
  • Assistant Editor to RiDE Journal, an internationally peer reviewed academic journal on theatre for social change and education (2019 - present).

Past, bits and bobs

  • Co-founder and artistic director of the international Paris Fringe festival  (2015-17).
  • Teacher at Paris Sorbonne University (2016-2018).
  • Theatre of the Oppressed with NAJE: forum theatre pieces and workshops in various contexts.
  • Forum Theatre workshops at Fleury Prison (women's section), Paris, France (2013).
  • Founded Frontierra, an organisation dedicated to advocating Migrants Rights through participatory Community Theatre. Fiscally Sponsored by Fractured Atlas, NYC, based at Immigrant Movement International , Corona, Queens, New York.
  • Working with a team on DREAMers, an investigative theatre project with The Civilians (Documentary Theatre) on the effects of Deferred Action and the potential DREAM Act for undocumented immigrants in the USA.
  • Ongoing project: translating into French, Spanish and Hungarian a detailed collection of Social Theatre activities, games and devising processes for practitioners internationally. If interested in this project, please contact me.
  • Participant in a panel discussion on 'Theatre of the Oppressed for Self-Organizing and Building a Community' with Theatre Of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB), at the Left Forum Conference, held at Pace University, 2013.