Contributors’ biographies

Season Butler is a writer, artist and dramaturg. Her recent artwork has appeared in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), Tate Exchange (London), the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga) and Hotel Maria Kapel (Netherlands). Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in 2019 and won the 2020 Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel. She is currently a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme, Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung. https://www.seasonbutler.com/

Charles O’Malley is Senior Systems Change Advisor for the United Nations Development Programme, where he focuses on how to accelerate transformation in global food and agricultural systems. He works at the intersection of personal, organisational and societal transformation. He has two decades of experience working on social and environmental issues across a variety of sectors, with everyone from start-ups to charities, large corporations and governments. Throughout this time, he has also been a practitioner of Family and Organisational Constellations, a therapeutic approach for addressing impasse in personal lives, family systems, organisations and wider social systems. https://www.charlesomalley.com

Prof Meg Jensen is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University London. Her research focuses on representations of human rights violation and/or traumatic experience in narrative form, and the social, cultural, gendered and familial contexts in which such works are produced. Recent applied projects, funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UNDP, assessed the effectiveness of Expressive Writing methodologies in supporting the well-being of women victims of sexual violence in conflict in Iraq and AHRC funded work with communities in crisis across Lebanon. Her most recent publications, including the monograph The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths (Palgrave 2019), evaluate a range of life narrative forms that represent traumatic experience (memoir, testimony, poetry, graphic novels, monuments, autobiographical novels etc.) and consider the relationship between such works and current behavioural, psychological, and neurochemical approaches to diagnosing and treating traumatic disorders. Her practice-based research takes the form of creative non-fiction and autobiographical novels concerned with representations of traumatic experience. https://www.kingston.ac.uk/staff/profile/dr-meg-jensen-107/

Julia Pond is a TECHNE-funded PhD student at Kingston University London. Her project “Dance and the re-articulation of value: Embodied pathways to sustainability” asks how embodied knowledge might help us re-articulate value in ways that support a sustainable society, through a dialogic approach that imagines intersections between dance, philosophy, economics and politics. Pond is an independent dance artist with over twenty years of experience as a choreographer, somatic practitioner, teacher, facilitator and performer, whose research interests and performance are at the intersection of dance and politics. Her recent work explores value and productivity through a durational installation of a fictional company called BRED; which has been presented recently at festivals such as Calm Down Dear and TripSpace's Make Movement Matter. Julia is also a co-initiator of the podcast DanceOutsideDance which features interdisciplinary conversations within and beyond dance. https://juliapond.com

Dr Almiro Andrade is a Black Queer Latinx actor, director, playwright, dramaturg, educationist and theatre translator. Their approach sees all stages of theatre-making as acts of translation and their practice champions the production of international pieces in the most diverse settings across the globe since 2000. Lecturer in Contemporary Acting and Associate Lecturer in Dramaturgy and Performance for Film and Television at University of the Arts London, their latest works include: Namibia, Não! by Aldri Anunciação at Soho Theatre; The Trial - tour with StoneCrabs Theatre; The Blind One and The Mad One by Cláudia Barral (IntiPress, 2021) produced by Foreign Affairs Theatre; Nelson Rodrigues: Selected Plays (Bloomsbury/Oberon, 2019). Currently working in association with the Royal Court Theatre on their first Call Out for Lusophone Playwrights. https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/wimbledon-college-of-arts/people/almiro-andrade

Paul Paschal is an artist, writer and dramaturg living in Nottingham UK. He is currently undertaking a TECHNE-funded PhD at the University of Roehampton and Sadler’s Wells Theatre, studying choreographic-curatorial practices to rethink institutional ambivalence. His current research interests include: belonging, demons, hosting, intimacy, memorialisation, moral rhetoric, note-taking, overcare and trans-generational contracts. The majority of his artistic work is undertaken in collaboration with Rohanne Udall, currently under the name Cha cha cha cha cha. They have been making performances, exhibitions and curatorial projects since 2013. They try to work with what they don’t fully understand, and try to have fun. www.chachachachacha.info; https://paulhughes.substack.com/

Approaches to social transformation through the arts: A TECHNE training day