Notes on Contributors

 

Caroline Astell-Burt is a professional puppeteer and independent researcher. Starting in puppetry as the first modern female Punch and Judy, she developed puppetry as an activity for learning disabled people of all ages. She is the co-founder and Director of Studies of the London School of Puppetry, the first UK school of puppetry for the profession. She has made an academic study of puppetry via Masters degrees from Middlesex and Royal Holloway, and holds a Doctorate from Loughborough. She writes and presents on puppetry and has a particular interest in Japanese otome bunraku (maidens doll theatre) and pēpāshiatā (paper theatre).

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Stephen Bailey is a director and theatre maker who regularly works in disabled-led performance, considering how unique experiences of atypical minds and bodies enable us to reconsider stories and innovate in performance. He was previously the winner of the RTST Sir Peter Hall Award and directed The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man for Nottingham Playhouse (2023). They are currently Artistic Lead of NPO Vital Xposure, leading the VX Labs programme with Central School of Speech and Drama to examine the benefit of disabled performance making across sectors, and are an Interdisciplinary Fellow with Oxford TORCH and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

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Harshadha Balasubramanian is a doctoral candidate in the Centre for Digital Anthropology at UCL. Harsha’s PhD explores the multidisciplinary practices emerging around designing non-visual access to virtual reality (VR) artwork, asking how practitioners negotiate the sensory politics enacted through virtual technologies and associated imaginaries. A defining feature of Harsha’s projects has been to centre disability as a creative and critical mode of intervention in research, co-producing and sharing these ideas through her ethnographic fieldwork embedded in VR projects, lectureships at the Royal College of Art, a fellowship at the Critical Design Lab, and an internship at Microsoft Research.

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Fiona Crouch is a PhD candidate at Northumbria University. After serving as an Army Officer, she now enjoys a portfolio career in the Performing Arts and education sectors. In 2019 she completed her MA in Creative and Cultural Industries Management, also at Northumbria University. Her research considers the concepts of neurodiversity, identity, connection, enchantment, and sensory interaction. She is passionate about empowering inclusion and democratising participation in creative/cultural activities. Fiona is a volunteer trustee at Cheltenham Festival of Performing Arts. She regularly contributes to the Culture Project, a web magazine. Her first play was performed at Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre in 2023.  

 

Livia Daza-Paris is a Venezuelan-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Her investigative practice, called ecologies of poetic forensics, stems from her experimental dance background—informed by the Skinner Releasing Technique and its kinaesthetic poetics—and her inquiries into the nonofficial history of political disappearances in 1960s Venezuela. Her ‘attunement investigations’ speculate on more-than-human beings as witnesses and co-investigators of state violence. She works with durational performative interventions, moving images, documentary evidence, and participatory art. She is a doctoral practice-based research candidate at the University of Plymouth, UK. Daza-Paris’ writings appear in the journals Performance Research, VIS NORDIC, THEOREM, and Project Anywhere. Her work has been presented at DTW, PS 122 in NYC, Alchemy Film Festival in Scotland, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas, Ruskin Art Gallery (Cambridge, UK), Optica Gallery, SBC Gallery and Museum of Fine Arts, and MAADI in Montreal, Canada.

 

Zoë Glen (she/they) is a neurodivergent theatre practitioner, actor-trainer and researcher. Her research interests include inclusive practice, neurodiversity and access in actor training, and how phenomenology can be used in acting. Zoë also works as a facilitator in participatory arts settings, with a particular interest in working with neurodivergent participants. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Kent, investigating the needs and experiences of autistic student-actors on BA acting programmes. 

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Georgie Hook (she/her) is a performance designer and researcher. Devising work in collaboration with theatre artists, she has designed for performances at venues across the UK. Her creative practice uses elements of set, costume, and light. She has a particular interest in the potential of materials to transform/perform. Following an MA in Performance Design, Georgie won the TaPRA Postgraduate Essay Prize in 2022. Her current PhD at the University of Leeds is funded by the AHRC, through the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities. Her research explores the potential of scenography to cultivate ecological awareness in everyday places, focusing on experiences of domestic environments. She is also studying for a certification in permaculture design. 

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Nina Kunzendorf is a theatre artist and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her PhD thesis explores how the theme of female vengeance played out in 21st-century adaptations of Euripides’ canonical play, Medea. Nina’s diverse artistic practice began as a set designer for theatre. She has since worked in various combinations as a designer, writer, director, performer, and filmmaker. At Goldsmiths, Nina co-convenes the Performance Research Forum, a long-running public research event series within the Department of Theatre and Performance. Additionally, she is an editorial board member of Platform. Nina holds a BA in Performance: Design and Practice from Central Saint Martins, UAL, and an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths.

 

Xueting Luo is a postgraduate researcher at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, where she conducts her research on the dance of traditional Chinese opera with an emphasis on its cultural aesthetics and its development in cross-culture contextualisation. She completed her MA at Beijing Dance Academy (2018) in the research direction of Chinese dance history and aesthetics. She also works as a qualified dance teacher and performer at Goldsmiths Confucius Institute and UCLan Confucius Institute. The ambition of Xueting’s PhD project is to develop the aesthetic value of dance for the sake of cultural inheritance, intercultural communication and human well-being through in-depth theoretical research combined with practice.

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Keepa Maskey, based in Nepal, is discovering a sense of belongingness within the process of learning. Keepa has been confronting implications around body and identity. She recognises the cruciality of exploring layers of neurodivergent complexities. Keepa positions and nurtures distinctiveness, interweaving practices, and knowledge of Newah, an indigenous community of Nepal. Keepa’s practice has allowed her to break cultural structures, experimenting with diverse perspectives. At present, Keepa is pursuing interdisciplinary research; an imagined notion of a community; a surfacing need for something authentic and holistic. Keepa imagines and participates in cultivating beyond Anthropocene ideology, fostering meaningful and vital emergences.

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Maria Oshodi is founder, CEO, and Artistic Director of Extant, the first performing arts organisation in the UK managed for and by visually impaired professional arts practitioners. Maria has directed and produced ground-breaking touring theatre productions, such as Resistance (2005), Obscurity (2009), Sheer (2012), The Chairs (2014/16), and Flight Paths (2019/20). She also instigated the research, development and production of site specific experimental innovative haptic performance exploring access, navigation, and technology in The Question (2010) and Flatland (2015). As a writer, her plays have been produced by national touring companies such as Talawa and Graeae. She is currently engaged with completing a PhD by Public Works at Middlesex University on Extant and the position of visual impairment in theatre.

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Ruba Totah is an independent postdoctoral researcher. She holds a PhD from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany (2021). Her research sits at the intersection between anthropology, cultural history, and performing arts with regional specialisation in the Middle East. Her research interests include transnationalism, intercultural and cross-cultural performing arts spaces, and religiosity. Her recent interest in performing rituals of church communities around Jerusalem contributes to an anthropological approach to analysing the history of ethnomusicological practices.