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As Brunel’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Development, Steve’s portfolio includes knowledge transfer and enterprise development, corporate relationship management, sponsorship and fundraising, PR and profile raising, special projects and international collaborations.
He was formerly Head of School of Arts at Brunel, where he led strategic developments including the establishment of four research centres, the recruitment of world-leading Professors including Fay Weldon and Stelarc, and the development of the University’s new £3M performance and media centre. He also initiated major curriculum developments including 11 new Masters courses and the introduction of new subject areas including Journalism and Videogames Design.
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| CAREER BACKGROUND |
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Steve began his career working in a range of roles within the creative industries. As an actor he worked with leading directors including Nicholas Hytner, Steven Berkoff, Michael Blakemore and Richard Eyre; and with experimental theatre companies such as Incubus and Lumiere & Son. During the early 1980s he worked for three years as a stand-up comedian at the original Comedy Store and Comic Strip in London, and appeared in the comedy series The Young Ones and The Comic Strip presents.
His theatre directing work includes productions in Mexico and Latvia, and in the UK at The Lowry, the ICA, and The Place; and he has produced an opera for Opera North.
Steve has directed five independent films including large-scale movies produced in community contexts, and has won an Industrial Society directing award for corporate video. He was Director of Training for Glasgow Film and Video Workshop, and has directed television programmes for Anglia and Granada Television, where he also produced an arts series.
Before joining Brunel, Steve was Associate Head (Teaching and Learning) of the School of Media, Music and Performance at Salford University (1991- 2005), and Head of Performance, and Director of Performance Research. He initiated major curriculum developments including co-founding the first honours degree combining Media and Performance (1992) and creating the first UK module in Stand-Up Comedy (1994) with alumni including Peter Kay.
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| PUBLISHED RESEARCH |
Steve is an internationally renowned researcher in the use of computer technologies in the performing arts, and is co-director of the AHRC-funded Digital Performance Archive, which established the largest online searchable database in the field.
His 800-page book Digital Performance (MIT Press, 2007) is the most comprehensive study to date, providing a detailed history and analysis of the field and proposing bold new theoretical arguments. It has been acclaimed in scholarly reviews as ‘Herculean’, ‘stunning’, ‘groundbreaking’, and ‘seminal’, and it has won two international awards: the Association of American Publishers Award for Excellence in Music and the Performing Arts (Professional/Scholarly Publishing Awards); and the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics, (Media Ecology Association).
Steve has also published extensively on subjects including theatre studies, film theory, digital arts, Artificial Intelligence, and pedagogy in journals including TDR, CTheory, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education and Performance Research; and four of his articles have been republished in academic Readers.
He co-founded and is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and is on the editorial board of the academic journals CTheory, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Body, Space & Technology.
He has been invited to present research seminars at Universities including Paris Sorbonne, Trinity, Beijing Film Academy, Kansas, Bayreuth, Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol, and has delivered keynote conference addresses in the USA, Australia, Korea and the UK.
Steve is director of The Chameleons Group (established 1994), a performance research company exploring new approaches to the creation of multi-media performances using a diverse range of performance styles and electronic media. The group has toured internationally with live 'film-theatre' productions where live actors work in front of large video screens, interacting with film characters and their own ‘digital doubles', and appear to move from the stage to the screen space.
In 2000, the group presented the most ambitious interactive cyber-theatre event ever staged, which allowed online audiences to direct the actors and write dialogue for the performances in real time. More recently Steve has collaborated with digital artists Paul Sermon, Andrea Zapp and Mathias Fuchs on Unheimlich (since 2005, Arts Council funded), a telematic performance installation exhibited at conferences including SIGGRAPH which enables improvisatory participation between audience members in the USA and live Chameleons Group performers in the UK.
The Chameleons Group has produced two innovative CD-ROMs analysing their work, both of which won international awards and were presented at digital arts exhibitions in Europe, Russia, and the USA. The Chameleons Group’s latest double DVD of their live multimedia theatre work is available gratis on request from: rachel.russell@brunel.ac.uk
Steve is a Research Panel member for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Panel 7, Music and Performing Arts), and has served on two specially constituted AHRC advisory panels (ICT in Creative and Performing Arts, and the Strategic Evaluation Review of AHDS). A recognised academic pioneer and advisor on the use of ICT in the arts and humanities, he is currently a standing committee member of Digital Resources in Humanities and Arts (DRHA) and an advisory board member of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), and Artifact (JISC Resource Discovery Network hub).
He has worked as a subject reviewer for the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and was a member of the Benchmarking Reference Group for Dance, Drama and Performance Studies. He has formerly been Chair of the Information Technology Group for the drama subject association SCUDD, a committee member for Performance Studies International, a panel advisor to the North West Arts Board, and an expert advisor on the JISC Arts and Humanities Research ICT Awareness and Training project.
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