Having just completed an MSc in Literature and Modernity with Distinction at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), Fani Apospori is particularly interested in the deconstruction of disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and beyond and is seeking to employ new ways of using literature to reframe and diversify climate narratives, particularly in coastal countries. Apospori has researched the role of literature and performance in environmental justice movements in the US, Canada and the Pacific and has written papers on radical eco-sentience, climate change as an intensification of colonial capitalism, Trans-Indigenous healing and place-based resilience during climate change. She has presented her work at the University of Edinburgh, the University of St. Andrews, l'Université Paris Cité, the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, the British Council and the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. Before embarking on a PhD journey, Apospori is currently working in UK climate action communications and engagement, and environmental justice multimedia storytelling. 

Dr Andrew Burton is a fixed-term teacher in the Literature, Film & Theatre Studies Department at the University of Essex. In 2023, he gained a PhD in Theatre Studies, his thesis re-evaluating the role of naturalism in contemporary eco-theatre. He also supervises students at the New School of the Anthropocene in London. Alongside his academic work, Andrew is an eco-dramaturg and theatre director, working primarily in the East of England. 

Lissie Carlile (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary researcher and artist whose practice engages with multi species entanglements with/in the Anthropocene. She is an independent lecturer currently based at BIMM University, Manchester. Lissie is undertaking her Ph.D. at the University of Chichester where she is a co-founder of the Arcanum of Apocalyptic Anthropocene’s research incubator. Her Practice Research utilises performance documentation methodologies to explore ephemerality and appearance/ disappearance/ reappearance of natural history through archival practices. She uses zine making as a performative approach to explore the documentation process of species extinction and responses to current climate chaos.

Choreographer, curator and researcher. Gala is a Lecturer at Escola Superior de Dança (Lisbon). Prior to this she was the Course Leader of MA Expanded Dance Practice at the LCDS. She received her PhD from Kingston University funded by a university scholarship. Her interests lie in experimental practices with an emphasis on notions of refusal, choreo-thinking, fugitivity, improvisation(s), opacity, black (non)performances, negotiation, and hospitality. As a choreographer she collaborated with contemporary artists Sonia Boyce and Portuguese Griot theatre company. Recent performative interventions include Passa Folhas (Venice Biennale), Table for Upside Down Practices in Gulbenkian Foundation and Tramway (UK) and Farmácia Fanon (Culturgest). Gala is a co-convenor of the Theater, Performance and Philosophy group of TaPRA and of the EDI's European League of Institutes of Arts. Gala is part of the collective of artist-curators that represents Portugal at 2024 Venice Biennale. 

Helen Gilbert is Professor of Environmental Arts at Royal Holloway University of London and an established expert in postcolonial theatre and performance studies. In the past five years, she has been developing new collaborative research in applied ecology and now leads CoastARTS, a multi-country project using creative methods to investigate coastlines as zones of ecocultural crisis. Her recent publications include essays on Indigenous performance in the Anthropocene era, notably in Australia and the Pacific, and the co-edited book, Marrugeku: Telling That Story (with Rachael Swain and Dalisa Pigram, 2021). 

Dr Jodie Hawkes and Dr Pete Phillips are artist researchers, senior lecturers and programme coordinators of the BA (Hons) Acting and BA (Hons) Acting for Contemporary Theatre degrees at the University of Chichester. They have also been collaborating together for over 20 years as live art duo Search Party.  Search Party’s practice-as-research is concerned with hope, ecology and the duo, engaging in collaborative strategies for performance making and thinking. Currently they are co-editing a book titled ‘Mothers, Mothering, Nature & Land’ for Demeter Press and Hawkes is co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of performing Arts and Digital Media. Their work has been performed in venues and festivals in the UK and internationally. They have made performances for theatres, galleries, public squares, 24-hour parties, high streets, village fetes, parks, shopping centres, across rivers, between bridges and along sea fronts. Their work has been performed in venues and festivals in the UK and Internationally, including Culturegest (Lisbon, Portugal), The National Review of Live Art (Glasgow, UK), ANTIfestival (Kuopio, Finland), Plateaux (Frankfurt, Germany), Nuit Blanche (Amiens, France), PAD (Mainz, Germany), InTacto (Victoria de Gadiz, Spain), ArtBatFest (Almaty, Kazakstan) and Junction Arts Festival (Launceston, Australia).

Dr Cath Heinemeyer is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Senior Researcher in Ecological Justice at York St John University, where she co-leads the university’s Living Lab, a network of staff and students collaborating to investigate and address local ecological justice issues. She teaches across both undergraduate and postgraduate Performance courses, primarily on applied theatre practice, politically engaged practice, theatre for social change, and arts-based research methods. As part of the duo Adderstone, she creates original music-infused storytelling performances that resonate with an era of climate crisis. She is the author of ‘Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People’ as well as many articles, chapters and creative outputs exploring the role of dialogic storytelling in the current moment. 

Dr Ben Hunt is a performance artist, activist, and researcher whose work explores the intersections of theatre, animal rights, and posthumanist theory. He recently completed a PhD in Performance Studies at De Montfort University, where his research examined performance as a form of direct action and interspecies witnessing within the UK animal rights movement. His practice-based work spans endurance performance, activist ritual, and digital performance art, engaging with themes of trauma, ecological collapse, and the limits of the human. Ben’s work seeks to challenge speciesist narratives and foster affective, ethical relationships across species boundaries through creative practice. 

Soyun Jang is a PhD candidate in performing arts and robotics at Utrecht University, focusing on artistic interventions in human-robot interaction (HRI) development processes. She investigates knowledge in performing arts practices that are often embedded in the ways of doing and making, and how this can be a mode of doing research in HRI. Her work is informed by her experience as a dancer. She holds an RMA degree in Media, Art and Performance Studies (UU). Her research is part of the interdisciplinary ‘Dramaturgy for Devices’ project, funded by the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA). 

Stef Kerrigan is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Acting within the Division of Communication, Screen and Performance at the University of Chester. Her current research focuses on classical theatre, adaptation, ecodramaturgy and psychophysical performer training.

Jonathan Kirn (he/his) is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, researching questions of relationality, ecology and (in-)determinacy within a diffractive reading of Karen Barad and Theodor W. Adorno. Studying the performance of boundaries between human, nature, and technology, he is interested in paths towards sustainable ways of living in more-than-human assemblages. Jonathan holds a master’s degree in Dramaturgy from Goethe University Frankfurt and a bachelor’s degree in European Studies from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. He freelances as dramaturge and production manager and has worked among others with performance collective neco_nart, KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen and Ensemble Modern.

Professor Rosemary Klich is Director of Research at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex. Her research investigates performance technologies, embodiment, and spectatorship, and she teaches contemporary performance and creative producing. Her recent projects include Theatres Beyond the Stage on the role of regional theatres, Freelancers in the Dark on the impact of Covid-19 on freelance theatre workers, and the Arts Council England Cultural Freelancers Study 2024. Rosemary co-leads the University of Essex Digital, Cultural, and Creative Research Network and has published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research, International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, and Body Space Technology. 

Dr Roxanne Korda is a researcher, opera singer, and librettist, whose work explores presenting new opera, on esoteric subject matter, in unique spaces, to different audiences. Before training in opera she has a background in physics and so she co-founded the company Infinite Opera in order to combine her love of science, philosophy and music. She completed a practice-based PhD with the Midland4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, exploring re-presentations of non-human scientific concepts and objects through an operatic lens. Alongside working as a singer and librettist, she is research associate with the Open University on the Horizon funded ALPHABETICA project.

Carl Lavery teaches at the University of Glasgow. His most recent publication is the monograph An Idea for a Theatre Ecology (2025: MUP). He is close to finishing the follow-up, Landscape and Taste: Politics, Ecology and Performance. This will appear in 2027, again with MUP. He is currently working on an expanded, planetary notion of replaying that contests the historical focus usually accorded practices of reenactment in Theatre and Performance scholarship.

Patrick Lonergan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Galway. He is the author of many books, including most recently Theatre Revivals for the Anthropocene (Cambridge Elements) and is a PI on a project led by Helen Gilbert called CoastARTS: Coastlines as Zones of Ecocultural Crisis – Shaping Resilience through Transnational Performance-based Arts https://chanse.org/coastarts/ He is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation for Theatre Research. 

William McEvoy is Associate Professor of Drama and English at the University of Sussex, UK. His recent publications include his monograph, Reanimating grief (2024, MUP), about bereavement and loss in literature, theatre and performance.  

Mahlu Mertens is a published poet, professional director at Grensgeval (www.grensgeval.eu) and scholar. She obtained a PhD at Ghent University with a dissertation on Anthropocene theatre. She is currently a junior postdoctoral researcher at Antwerp University, where she works on an FWO funded research project on theatre for young audiences. Her articles appeared in a.o. Spiegel der letteren, American Imago, Literature Interpretation Theory and Studies in the Novel. She focuses on literature and theatre in Dutch and English and her research interests include the environmental humanities, age studies and childhood studies. 

Liz Pavey MA SFHE, dance artist/researcher (improviser, choreographer, teacher), has lectured in performance at Northumbria University since 2004. Her work is often site-specific or gallery-based and is informed by somatic movement practices and theories of embodiment. She is currently leading Living Stone a practice-research project investigating how durational improvised dance can help us make sense of the immensity and rhythms of geological time. Liz’s writing, focusing on listening and touch sensitivity, has been published in academic journals including The Senses and Society and the Journal of Arts & Communities. She is also a Shiatsu practitioner and business coach.

Dr Jodie Hawkes and Dr Pete Phillips are artist researchers, senior lecturers and programme coordinators of the BA (Hons) Acting and BA (Hons) Acting for Contemporary Theatre degrees at the University of Chichester. They have also been collaborating together for over 20 years as live art duo Search Party.  Search Party’s practice-as-research is concerned with hope, ecology and the duo, engaging in collaborative strategies for performance making and thinking. Currently they are co-editing a book titled ‘Mothers, Mothering, Nature & Land’ for Demeter Press and Hawkes is co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of performing Arts and Digital Media. Their work has been performed in venues and festivals in the UK and internationally. They have made performances for theatres, galleries, public squares, 24-hour parties, high streets, village fetes, parks, shopping centres, across rivers, between bridges and along sea fronts. Their work has been performed in venues and festivals in the UK and Internationally, including Culturegest (Lisbon, Portugal), The National Review of Live Art (Glasgow, UK), ANTIfestival (Kuopio, Finland), Plateaux (Frankfurt, Germany), Nuit Blanche (Amiens, France), PAD (Mainz, Germany), InTacto (Victoria de Gadiz, Spain), ArtBatFest (Almaty, Kazakstan) and Junction Arts Festival (Launceston, Australia).

Dr Matt Smith – Reader in Applied Theatre and Puppetry, University of

Portsmouth. Matt’s work is across disciplines such as theatre,

puppetry, masks, and music. Since 1993 he has collaborated in a

variety of settings including schools, youth groups, children in care,

prisons, hospitals, with environmental agencies, and with the

homeless. Matt has produced chapters and articles about applied

puppetry and is concerned with how a critical view of puppetry could

explore power, both in the puppets themselves and in the networks of

participatory practices. Recent monograph with Bloomsbury 2024 -

Applied Puppetry: The Theory and Practice of Puppet Ecologies. 

Natasha Stott is a research-artist-facilitator, working in intermedial performance who develops non-verbal, phenomenological languages of embodied communication with dancers and non-dancers. She has a PaR PhD in intermediality, The Performance Projection Paradigm: exploring the dialogue between the moving body and projected image, through improvisation. Natasha is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). She is a trustee for Touchdown Dance and has been a tutor for the Design for Dialogic Dance program at both the China Academy of Arts in Shanghai & the University of Salford. Her collaborative work with both these institutions was exhibited at Future Lab, West Bund in China. Natasha’s work was recognised as a model best practice by the Dean of Media & Performance at the University of Salford and shown at Nanjing University, China. 

Anna Street is Senior Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at Le Mans University in France. Translator of ten volumes in Les Petits Platons collection, her publications also include the co-edited volumes Inter Views in Performance Philosophy (Palgrave 2017), Genre Transgressions: Dialogues on Tragedy and Comedy (Routledge 2023), the forthcoming monograph Comedy of the Impossible: The Power of Play in Post-war European Drama (Open Book Publishers) as well as articles on comedy and philosophy and, more recently, immigrant and refugee theatre. Co-convener of the Performance Philosophy network and coordinator of the HydroArts project, her current research focuses on the role of the non-human in art and performance, notably that of water.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK.  His research seeks to situate social life in the longer perspective of human and planetary history, drawing on the social and natural sciences, arts and humanities.  He is co-author with Nigel Clark of Planetary Social Thought (2021), author of Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005), and co-editor of Risk, Environment and Modernity (1996), Re-Ordering Nature (2003) and Technofutures (2015).  As well as academic publications, his outputs include performances, creative writing and art-science exhibitions and events.  He was co-organiser of Between Nature: Explorations in Ecology and Performance (Lancaster, 2000), Experimentality (Lancaster/Manchester/London, 2009-10), and Anthropocene Monument, with Bruno Latour and Olivier Michelon (Toulouse, 2014-2015).  Before becoming an academic, he was a musician, composer and sound artist, working notably with Live Support System (Cardiff) and the post-minimalist ensemble Regular Music (London).

Ariane de Waal is a Senior Lecturer in British Cultural Studies at Leipzig University. Her research focuses on the construction and contestation of gendered, classed, racial, and religious subject positions in British and postcolonial theatre and performance. Her first monograph, Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama, was published by De Gruyter in 2017. She has published articles and book chapters on performative articulations of whiteness and neoliberal citizenship, climate change drama, British South Asian theatre, and Indian English drama. She has also co-edited a volume on Birth and Death in British Culture: Liminality, Power, and Performance (Cambridge Scholars, 2012), a special issue on “Bodies on Stage” (Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2013), and a special issue on “Terror on Tour: Borders, Detours, and Contingencies” (Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 2020).

Acknowledgement: My research for this paper has been undertaken as part of the Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona Research Project “Gender, Affect and Care in Twenty-First Century British Theatre”, a three-year research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the EU European Regional Development Fund (FFI2016-75443).

Dr Nik Wakefield is Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Media, and

Creative Technologies at University of Portsmouth. He is a researcher,

artist and writer working in performance as well as dance, theatre and visual art. His research is concerned with theoretical issues of time

and ecology in contemporary work. Wakefield’s performance has been

shown in UK, USA and Europe. His writing has been published in

journals such as TDR, Performance Research, Maska, Choreographic

Practices, and Contemporary Theatre Review. Nik Wakefield is Working Group Coordinator in the Theatre and Performance Research Association. 

Lisa Woynarski (she/her) was born on traditional Anishinabewaki territory in Ontario, Canada. She is of white European settler/immigrant ancestry. She is now an immigrant herself as well as Associate Professor in Theatre in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, UK. Her research connects performance and ecology, from an intersectional lens, foregrounding decolonisation. She is the author of Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change (Palgrave, 2020) and the forthcoming Performing Urban Ecologies (Cambridge UP). She was co-lead on the ACE funded Work in Progress (2019-2024), working with artists on developing new work.