Åste Amundsen

Åste works in a range of creative, design and production roles across interactive theatre, immersive events, festivals and IRL-games. Her area of focus is achieving greater transportation in IRL immersive audience experiences through improved story delivery and interaction. Transformative worldbuilding and immersion for audience mobilisation are running themes in her work. She pioneered immersive festival environments in the UK through Glastonbury’s Underground Pianobar, and founded Computer Aided Theatre, to build a platform for data-augmenting live, actor-to-audience interaction. She is a recent fellow of immersion with the South West Creative Technology Network and doctoral researcher with Storyfutures developing a dramaturgy of personalisation for immersive life events

Steve Benford

Steve Benford is the Dunford professor of Computer Science at the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham where he directs the Horizon ‘My Life in Data’ Centre for Doctoral Training and the ’Smart Products’ research beacon. He previously held an EPSRC Dream Fellowship, has been a Visiting Professor at the BBC and was elected to the CHI Academy in 2012. He has collaborated with many artists over the past thirty years to create, tour and study interactive performances and installations with a view to gaining new

 insights into how humans can experience computers. He was part of a team awarded the Prix Art Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art for Can You See Me Now?, a collaboration with Blast Theory. He co-wrote the monograph Performing Mixed Reality with Gabriella Giannachi (MIT Press).

Sarah Ellis

Sarah Ellis is the Director of Digital Development for the RSC. Her latest partnership is the Audience of the Future Live Performance Demonstrator funded by InnovateUK. In 2017, she became a fellow of the University of Worcester. In 2016 awarded The Hospital Club & Creatives Industries award for cross-industry collaboration. In 2013 listed in the top 100 most influential people in Gaming and Technology by Guardian Culture Professionals. She is Industry Champion for the PEC, informing academic research on the creative industries. She is Chair of The Space, established by ACE and BBC to promote digital engagement across the arts.

Adam Ganz

Adam Ganz is Reader in Screenwriting at Royal Holloway University of London, and Head of Writers Lab at StoryFutures Academy. He is also a researcher on the StoryFutures Cluster. He writes for radio, film and TV and also works as a dramaturge and narrative consultant. He recently co-wrote The Filmmakers House with Marc Isaacs which will be premiered at the Sheffield Film Fest and his book Robert De Niro at Work: From Screenplay to Screen Performance (with Professor Steven Price) will be published by Palgrave Macmillan later this year.

Dries Gijsels 

Dries Gijsels is a Brussels-based theatre maker and theatre director. With Renée Goethijn, he created and directed No Use For Binoculars (2015) and Totally (2017). His own directorial debut Realtime (2020) was selected for the New Work section of the Belgian TheaterFestival. He is a member of the Brussels theatre and arts collective Koekelbergse Alliantie van Knutselaars. With K.A.K. he has made Office de Tourisme / Agence de Voyage (2016); Life, Death & Television (2018) and Snøw (2019). He also occasionally works as an assistant director, including for Ivo Van Hove and Simon Stone. In his work, Gijsels examines the relation between man and technology, as he questions the statute of reality in a changing world. He meticulously deconstructs the world as we know it to subsequently reassemble it in an often absurd and slightly surrealistic way. In this process, humanity, humor and compassion serve as the ultimate accomplices to survive in a world that is becoming increasingly elusive.

Eric Joris 

Eric Joris (Antwerp,1955) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher. He has been pioneering immersive media from 2003. His VR or AltR is fully anchored in the physical body. CREW is the artistic vehicle for his work and is composed of scientists and artists. The company has developed technology and media concepts with the Universities of Hasselt and Antwerp, and with partners inside of European and international research programmes. CREW’s live performances and installations C.A.P.E., W_Headswap, Terra Nova, Eux, Hands-on Hamlet, Hamlet’s Lunacy, Collateral Rooms have been shown at major festivals and conferences (e.g. Festival d’Avignon, Steiriches Herbst Graz, World expo Shangai, Siggraph, FMX, IBC). Actual research integrates VR with intelligent agents in large scale VR environments, using motion capture, CG and 3D scans.

Chiel Kattenbelt

Chiel Kattenbelt is an associate professor in intermediality and media comparison at Utrecht University. He is the co-founder and former convener of the research working group Intermediality in Theatre and Performance under the auspices of the International Federation for Theatre Research and a board member of the International Society for Intermedial Studies. His fields of interest are theatre and media theory, intermediality and media comparison, and aesthetics and semiotics. His research is partly practice-based. The latest project in collaboration with the Belgian company CREW is Hamlet's Lunacy, which mainly used virtual reality and motion capture.

Jeremy Killick

Jeremy specialises in devised theatre. Since 1999 he has been a regular collaborator with Forced Entertainment, appearing in over a dozen of their shows and performing all over the world. He appears in the occasional play, like Swedish poet Niklas Rådström's Monsters about the Bulger killing, directed by Christopher Haydon. He’s more often to be found in mainland Europe, working with people like Flemish choreographer and filmmaker Wim Vandekeybus, for whom he has starred in two feature films: Galloping Mind and Monkey Sandwich (Venice Film Festival). Recently, he performed Hamlet’s Lunacy of CREW in 2019, a play bringing together new media and VR technologies.

Largely responsible for this avoidance of conventional theatre is his extraordinary training at the University of Exeter Drama Department in the mid 1980s, where he studied the techniques of the great European theatre-makers like Brecht and Meyerhold. His career-long dedication to work which pushes at the boundaries between theatre, art and dance has earned him passing mentions in several books on contemporary theatre. He features on the cover and in the text of Claire MacDonald’s book Utopia: Three Plays for a Postdramatic Theatre.

Andy Lavender

Andy Lavender is Vice Principal and Director of Production Arts at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London. Practice-based research includes Agamemnon Redux (Paris, Athens and Warwick), exploring motion capture for live performance (part of the Mask and Avatar project conducted with colleagues from Paris 8 University and Warwick). His writing includes the monograph Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement (Routledge 2016), articles in performance journals, and recently a chapter on new multimodal performances in a book entitled Intermedial Theatre: Principles and Practices (Red Globe Press 2019). He is series editor of 4x45, published by Digital Theatre (online videos) and Routledge (print volumes).

Ollie Lindsey

Ollie Lindsey has worked as a Creative Director for over 15 years developing experiences for Heritage, Culture & Entertainment. He formed All Seeing Eye in 2016, a highly regarded team of designers, artists and developers who build unparalleled immersive & social experiences. Their work mixes the application of technology such as Virtual and Augmented Reality with game design, theatre and performance. Ollie has led the team behind several highly regarded VR/Theatrical Experiences such as Draw Me Close, All Kinds of Limbo and Fabulous Wonder.land with the National Theatre, and My Name Is Peter Stillman and Nothing to be Written with 59 Productions, as well as producing Dambusters, the first commercial VR LBE for the history & heritage sector. He has been involved in several releases on the Oculus Store for non-game titles for the BBC, 59 Productions and Aardman, as well as delivering internationally acclaimed VR & LBE experiences on Rift, Vive, Magic Leap, and Quest. His work has been repeatedly received recognition through selection for Tribeca, Sundance, Venice and SXSW amongst others.

Aneta Mancewicz

Aneta Mancewicz is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on Shakespearean performance, intermediality, and European theatre. She is the author of Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Biedny Hamlet [Poor Hamlet] (Ksiegarnia Akademicka Press, 2010). In 2018 she co-edited two collections of essays published by Palgrave Macmillan: Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere and Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance. Since 2016 she has collaborated with the Belgian performance collective CREW on adaptations of Hamlet integrating Virtual Reality into live performance.

Eirini Nedelkopoulou 

Dr. Eirini Nedelkopoulou is a lecturer in Digital Arts at the University of Glasgow. Her work as author and editor appears in the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and others. She is the co-editor of Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations (Routledge 2015, 2018). Eirini is currently working on her monograph In Solitude: The Philosophy of Digital Performance Encounters (Bloomsbury, Thinking Through Theatre).

Jen Parker-Starbuck

Professor Jen Parker-Starbuck is the Head of School of Performing and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Cyborg Theatre (2011), co-author of Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015), and co-editor of Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices, (2015), and many other book chapters and journal articles. She was the Editor of Theatre Journal from 2015-19, and is a Contributing Editor to PAJ, and the International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media. She is a Theme Leader for Story Lab, a strand of the ARHC funded Creative Clusters Programme StoryFutures.

Dan Rebellato

Dan Rebellato is Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London and has published widely on contemporary British theatre. His books include 1956 and All That, Theatre & Globalization, The Suspect Culture Book, and Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009. He is co-editor of Contemporary European Theatre Directors, Contemporary European Playwrights, The Cambridge Companion to British Plays and Playwrights since 1945, and the Theatre & series for Palgrave. As a playwright, his work for stage and radio include Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day, Static, Chekhov in Hell, Cavalry, Emily Rising, and My Life Is A Series of People Saying Goodbye.

Jonathan Thonon

Jonathan Thonon is European Project Manager at Theatre de Liège (Belgium) and artistic director of IMPACT (International Meeting in Performing Arts and Creative Technologies) a project that aims to build bridges between Performing arts, Science and Technology.

Since 2017, the IMPACT FORUM has taken place each year in November, mixing performances, workshops, talks and exhibitions. Jonathan is also Co-Founder of Wallifornia Musictech, a MusicTech hub based in Liège (Belgium), associate researcher at the University of Liège, working on Digital Arts, Cinema & Contemporary Arts and Lecturer at the Liège School of Arts on New Media Arts.

Joris Weijdom

Joris Weijdom is a researcher and designer of mixed-reality experiences focusing on interdisciplinary creative processes and performativity. He is a lecturer and researcher at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht where he founded the Media and Performance Laboratory (MAPLAB), enabling practice-led artistic research on the intersection of performance, media and technology from 2012 until 2015. Currently, he works as a researcher at the Professorship Performative Processes and teaches on several BA and MA courses. As part of his PhD project, Joris researches creative processes in collaborative mixed-reality environments (CMRE) in collaboration with the University of Twente and Utrecht University.

Tim White

Tim White is Director of Education in the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, University of Warwick. His teaching and research interests include food and performance, immersive practices, online performance, video, and performance in public spaces. His most recent publication is the concluding essay in Occasions of State, part of Routledge’s European Festival Studies Series. He has collaborated with Andy Lavender on a series of digital projects.