Nicki Shaughnessy - [email protected] (Centre Director)
Nicki's work explores the cognitive and physiological processes involved in making, participating in and experiencing performance. In addition to publications she is involved in practice-based projects using applied drama and performance in the workplace as part of Kent's Innovation, Creativity and Enterprise network as well as an AHRC funded interdisciplinary project on drama, performance and intermediality as interventions for autism (www.imaginingautism.org). All of her work integrates theory and practice to demonstrate the value of the arts and their importance in society. Read more.
Melissa Trimingham - [email protected] (Deputy Director)
Melissa's specialisms are contemporary performance, puppetry and object theatre, scenographic space, Modernism, the Bauhaus stage and applied theatre. She has worked with Horse and Bamboo Theatre, Lancashire, of which she was a founder member; Chol Theatre, Huddersfield; and Shadowland Theatre in Toronto, including a tour to the Toy Theater Festival in New York (2005).Her current research centres on embodiment, phenomenology, the plastic and sonic properties of scenographic space, and puppetry. She is particularly interested in the connections between the ‘materiality’ of performance and the autistic perception of the world. Read more.
Helen Brooks - [email protected] (Deputy Director)
Helen's research focuses on long eighteenth-century theatre performance, in particular the presentation of the body in performance and acting methodologies With a specific focus on women's performance current areas of interest include cross-dressing and travesty performance, histories of gender and sex, and notions of sensibility and sympathy in performance. She also have research interests in applied drama and ran the ICE project with Nicola Shaughnessy in 2009. Read more.
Robert Shaughnessy - [email protected] (Deputy Director)
Profile to follow shortly.
Virginia Pitts - [email protected]
As both an academic and a filmmaker, Virginia Pitts is dedicated to fostering dialogue between critical enquiry and creative practice. Her screen production work spans drama, documentary, screendance and various hybrid forms for both film and television. Virginia's recent research explores creative processes, various forms of inter-subjective relations, and the permeability of borders between mainstream and experimental or marginal cinemas. Her academic interests are thus closely tied to her recent creative practice, much of which draws upon processes of haptic visuality and kinesthetic empathy with bodily movement to enhance audience engagement with narrative and character. She is currently developing a feature length screenplay based on New Zealand dancer and rebel, Freda Stark. In tandem with this, Virginia is also exploring how forms of embodied engagement with cinema can be applied to screen development processes. Read more.
Ania Bobrowicz - [email protected]
Ania first graduated with a degree in Applied Linguistics before taking an MSc in Multimedia Systems. She is now a lecturer in Multimedia Technology and Design at Kent. She teaches visual communication, interaction design and digital art and has interets in Human-computer interaction, new media, visual communication, and social movements. Read more.
Paul Fretwell - [email protected]
Paul is a composer of instrumental and electronic music and has received many international performances of his work. He began his compositional career at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester where he composed a range of pieces for small ensembles to full orchestra. He also took a strong interest in the performance of contemporary music and played many concerts of twentieth-century piano repertoire, including Stockhausen, Cage, and Takemitsu. Many of his pieces were performed on the world-famous BEAST system (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre) in concerts across the UK. He enjoys working collaboratively, and has produced a series of successful electronic works with Ambrose Field from the University of York. This project, called 'Northern Loop', has been heard in different versions around the world, most notably as part of the International Computer Music Conference. He has also worked with the composer Colin Riley, helping to develop electronic music as part of Music Orbit, a PRS-funded network that hosts music events and promotes upcoming artists. Read more.
Duska Radosavljevic - [email protected]
Duška'scurrent research interests include contemporary British and European theatre practice as well as more specifically, ensemble theatre and dramaturgy. Duška has worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company where she engaged with the issues of kinaesthetic learning and teaching innovation at university level. Between 2002-2005, as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble and Newcastle University, she worked with a selection of local, national and international theatre artists on devised and new writing projects. As a freelance dramaturg, Duška has also worked for New Writing North, Dance City, Dramaturgs' Network and the National Student Drama Festival. In the early stages of her career, sha was involved as a performer and director with a number of young theatre companies both in the north of England and in her native Yugoslavia. More recently, Duška has focused her energies on the issue of the 'ensemble way of working' mostly as a means of conceptualizing her experience of working with ensembles. This research is intended to lead to two book-length publications – a collection of interviews with ensemble theatre-makers, and a monograph on the changing roles of text and performance in contemporary theatre-making, culminating with the increasingly intriguing trend of interactive performance. Her practice as research projects in the area of music theatre, developed with University of Leeds-based Altitude North, elaborate this enquiry furthe. Read More.
Frank Camilleri - [email protected]
Frank joined the University of Kent in September 2008 after serving as Academic Coordinator of the Theatre Studies Programme at the University of Malta from 2004 to 2008. He is Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project [10] – a theatre laboratory practice that investigates the space between training and performance processes. In the course of his activity in theatre Camilleri developed a way of relating to the work of the actor based on a study of elaboration of acrobatics, plastiques, martial arts, dance, and mime. He has also developed a vocal training process which evolved from the work on physical actions. Camilleri has worked with John Schranz (1989-2003), Ingemar Lindh (1994-1997), and performed under Lech Raczak (formerly of Osmegio Dnia theatre) in La Vita di S. Giovanni (Urbino, 1994) and La Pietra e il Dolore (Urbino, 1996). His solo performance Id-Descartes (1996-2003) was presented in various European contexts. Read More