Staff Profiles

Johannes Birringer joined Brunel University's School of Arts in early 2006. He is director of the DAP-Lab and Acting Director of the newly created Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance. He is a choreographer and media artist, and artistic director of AlienNation Co., a Houston-based multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on numerous site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. After directing international workshops on dance and technology in England, Germany, and the U.S., he was appointed head of the new dance and technology program at The Ohio State University (1999-2003) where he developed the new MFA curriculum in dance technologies and conducted research programs in his "Environments Lab." In 2003 he was appointed Principal Research Fellow in Live Art and Performance at Nottingham Trent University. In late 2005 he convened the Digital Cultures Lab, a cross-cultural dance and technology workshop-festiva, and in 2003 he founded the Interaktionslabor Goettelborn in a former Coal Mine in the Saarland, Germany. The Interaktionslabor is an annual international workshop dedicated to research, performance and software application development in interactive and networked media technologies.

His exhibition-performances and digital films have been staged in Europe, the U.S., Latin America, China and Japan. He has received numerous arts grants, awards, and fellowships for his work including a NEA/Rockefeller artists project grant in 1993. More recently, his directing projects included multi-media play Sueno, the interactive dance work Suna no Onna (London 2007-08), the digital oratorio Corpo, Carne e Espirito (Brasil 2008), and UKIYO [Moveable Worlds] (2009-2010), a choreographic installation created with artists from DAP-Lab and Tokyo/Japan.

Birringer received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Trier University (Germany) after graduate research fellowships at Cambridge and Yale Universities. He has taught performance studies at Yale University, UT-Dallas, Rice University, Northwestern University, and at the Giessen Institute of Applied Theatre Science.

Dr Broderick Chow is an artist-scholar with experience in numerous fields of the performing arts. He has been an actor, stand-up comedian, performer, writer, director and song-and-dance man. This wide-ranging approach has influenced both his research and teaching.

His work intersects with performance practice, political philosophy, and social theory. In 2010, Broderick became the first doctoral graduate of the Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London. His thesis, How to do things with jokes: relocating the political dimension of performance comedy examined his practice as a stand-up comedian in relation to larger questions of the validity of satire in the age of global capitalism.

Recent work includes an auto-ethnographic study of professional wrestling training. Broderick is currently at work on a monograph on performance, physical cultures, and precarious labour (see Research and Teaching).

Broderick is one half of Dangerologists, a male dance and physical theatre duo. Their piece Work Songs was developed with support in kind of the School of Arts (see More about Broderick).

Meretta trained as an actress at the School of Theatre, Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University). She went on to complete an MA in Drama Studies at the University of North London. Meretta has also undertaken training with Geese Theatre Company on Applied Drama Practice with offenders (Behind the Wall programme) and is a trained Mediator.

As an actress, Meretta worked in provincial theatre, community theatre, Theatre-in-Education, radio and TV for seven years before focusing on directing and teaching. She has directed, devised or performed in over 25 professional productions.

Royona has a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London (2011) on the British-Bangladeshi artist Akram Khan, an MA in Physical Theatre from Royal Holloway, University of London (2001) and a BA (Hons) in Theatre & Performance from the University of Plymouth (2000). She trained in classical and contemporary South Asian dance in India and specialised in physical theatre in the UK. Royona was the founding member and performer with Kinaetma Theatre, an intercultural physical theatre company that made work between India, UK and Portugal from 2002 to 2007.

Prior to joining the Theatre Department at Brunel, Royona was a full-time and permanent academic member of staff in the Drama Department at University of Wolverhampton where she was also the MA Drama Course Leader. She has also taught in the Theatre and Performance Department at the University of Plymouth.

Royona was elected as Secretary to join the Executive Committee for SCUDD (Standing Conference for University Drama Department). She is also a member of SDHS (Society of Dance History Scholars) and TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association).

Ian Morgan graduated from Hull University with a BA in Drama and Kent with an MA (PaR) in Theatre. He trained as a performer at Monika Pagneux and Philipe Gaulier’s Studio in Paris; then went on to work with Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards for three years at their Workcenter in Italy. He has performed/devised with Teatro Pirequa at Théâtre du Soleil, ManAct, the Centre of Performance Research (CPR), Meredith Monk, Guillermo Gómez–Peña, Mkultra Performance Collective, Zecora Ura, Phillip Zarrilli and the Llanarth Group and Dan Canham’s Still House project. Since 2004 he has been a principal performer with the award winning Polish ensemble Song of the Goat.

Dr. Grant Tyler Peterson joined Brunel in 2013, having previously taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, University of Winchester, and Bath Spa University.  Grant is an emerging scholar and has published work on a diverse range of subjects including British alternative theatre history, dance, gender, sexuality, and digital research methodologies. 

Grant holds experience as a performer in theatre, musical theatre, television and commercials, and worked in numerous venues throughout Los Angeles and Southern California. He was trained at elite programmes including the Orange County School of the Arts and the Ray Bolger Musical Theatre Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

In addition to receiving a BA in theatre and musical theatre at UCLA, Grant earned an interdisciplinary Masters degree in experimental theatre and dance under the guidance of Sue-Ellen Case and David Gere.  After moving to Britain, he received Ph.D. funding from the Higher Education Funding Council of England (Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme) to study at Royal Holloway under the supervision of Professor Dan Rebellato and Dr. Chris Megson. This resulted in a project that examined British street theatre traditions and presented the first formal case study of one of England’s longest running – yet overlooked – street theatre troupes, the Natural Theatre Company.

Dani Ploeger is an artist and theorist, living and working in London and Berlin. Heralded in the press as the ‘Jimi Hendrix of the sphincter’, Dani’s performance installations often involve cheap readily available medical and consumer technologies and explore themes around the technologized body, sexuality and vanity.

His artwork has been featured in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Basel, Experimental Intermedia in New York, para/site art space in Hong Kong and KipVis in Vlissingen, Netherlands. His writing in the field of digital art and cultural studies has been published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and the Body, Space and Technology Journal, among others. He is also a permanent contributor to The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press).

Dani is a studio artist at ]performance s p a c e[ in London. After holding a position as Lecturer in Performing Arts at De Montfort University in Leicester, he was appointed as Lecturer in Theatre and Digital Arts at Brunel University London in 2012.

Photo: © John Connor Press Associates

Mary came to Brunel University in September 2001 and completed her PhD Resisting the Limits of the Performing Body (University of Warwick) the following year. She runs the Peer Assisted Learning Scheme (PALS) for Drama/Theatre students and provides ongoing support for our dedicated student team of PALS facilitators.

She also co-produces arts@artaud; the showcase platform for theatre, film, music, performance poetry, dance and multi-media presentations from across the School of Arts.

Gretchen Schiller is a choreographer who works in the field of media dance, videodance, participatory installations and movement environments. She has produced various projects in residency at the Banff Centre of the Arts (Camara ’96, Shifting Ground ’99, trajets ‘00 and the Raumspielpuzzle workshops ’03) and her works have toured in North America and Europe.

Gretchen Schiller received her BA from the University of Calgary, Canada in Dance and French Canadian studies followed by a MA from the UCLA, California, US in Choreography, and PhD from the University of Plymouth, UK in Interactive Arts. She directed the Diplôme Création Audiovisuelle Numérique for seven years at the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III, France and has taught workshops in Canada, Germany, England and France. She is the artistic director of Mo-vi-da, which supports the creative research in mediadance and interactive arts.

Stelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA - including new music, dance festivals and experimental theatre. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body.

He has performed with a THIRD HAND, a VIRTUAL ARM, a VIRTUAL BODY and a STOMACH SCULPTURE. He has acoustically and visually probed the body- having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon, approximately two metres of internal space. He has done twenty-five body SUSPENSIONS with insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations in remote locations.

For FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis, he developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. Recently for Kampnagel, he completed EXOSKELETON- a pneumatically powered 6-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures.

Current projects include the EXTRA EAR - a surgically constructed ear as an additional facial feature that coupled with a modem and a wearable computer will act as an internet antenna, able to hear RealAudio sounds. And MOVATAR is an intelligent avatar that will be able to perform in the real world by possessing a physical body. It will have a sound feedback loop from the body giving the virtual entity an ear in the world.

He has also completed an EXTENDED ARM - a manipulator with eleven degrees-of-freedom that extends his arm to primate proportions and a MOTION PROSTHESIS- an intelligent, compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise, repetitive and accelerated prompting or programming of the arms in real-time.

In 1995 Stelarc received a three year Fellowship from The Visual Arts/ Craft Board, The Australia Council. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was Artist-In-Residence for Hamburg City in 1998. In 1999 he was appointed as a Senior Research Scholar for the Faculty of Art and Design at the Nottingham Trent University, and in 2003 became Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at The Nottingham Trent University. In the spring of 2006 he was appointed Professor in the School of Arts at Brunel University.

• Resume
• Current projects
  

Fiona Templeton is an internationally recognised innovator in writing and directing for theatre and performance. She is currently Artistic Director and founder of The Relationship, a performance group based in both New York and London; and in the 70s was co-founder of the influential Theatre of Mistakes. Her large-scale site-specific work has won numerous international awards.

Her publications include plays, poetry and writing on the theory of performance. Fiona also collaborates with artists in other fields including visual arts, dance and music such as Elliott Sharp, Samita Sinha, Pamelia Kurstin, Molissa Fenley, Siobhan Liddell and Joan Jeanrenaud.

She has directed the work of innovative writers including Elfriede Jelinek (whom she has also translated), Michael Gottlieb, Suzan-Lori Parks and Leslie Scalapino.

Her work is shown at venues as varied as the Tate Britain, the Tramway in Glasgow, the Vortex in Dalston, ODC Theatre in San Francisco, the Puerto Rico International Festival of Theatre, Fort Jay on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, the abandoned Pennsylvania Eastern State Penitentiary, and as commissions for Chashama Theatre and the Poetry Project in New York, and the Cultural Capital of Europe Festivals of Rotterdam and Lille. Collaborating organisations have included Amnesty International, French Railways, the Slovene Socialist Party headquarters, the offices of the European Union, a commercial accounting firm in the city of London, and a snackbar on Brick Lane.

She has received awards and fellowships including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the US National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has held a Senior Judith Wilson Fellowship in poetry and writing for performance at Cambridge.