Amanda Bayley is professor of music at Bath Spa University where she leads an interdisciplinary research group on Intercultural Communication through Practice. Her publications include the award-winning book, Recorded Music: Performance, Culture, and Technology (2010). She is co-editor of a new book series with Routledge on Transcultural Musical Practices arising from the ERC-funded project, ‘Beyond East and West: developing and documenting an evolving transcultural musical practice’ (2015-2023). Her interdisciplinary projects include Hear Water: Building Environmental Empathy through Deep Listening (2022-2024) and an international research network Ecotones: Soundscapes of Trees (2022-2023). One of her current projects is ‘Developing a Toolkit for Interdisciplinary and Diverse Communities of Practice: Listening, Somatics, Presence, Wellbeing’ (AHRC/UKRI Impact Accelerator Award).
Cara Hagan is a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities, and a dreamer. She believes in the power of art to upend the laws of time and physics, a necessary occurrence in pursuit of liberation. In her work, no object or outcome is sacred; but the ritual to get there is. Hagan’s adventures take place as live performance, on screen, as installation, on the page, and in collaboration with others in a multitude of contexts.
Most recently, Hagan's immersive, site specific work "were we birds?" was commissioned as part of the 90th anniversary season of the American Dance Festival. Additionally, Hagan's work titled, "SKIDD-ID-A-BOP was commissioned as part of the 2023 season for Rhythmically Speaking, a jazz-focused dance company based in Minneapolis. Hagan was awarded a 2023 GALLIM Parent Artist Residency, where she has had the pleasure of crafting a new solo work titled, "Mama Piranha." Thus far, iterations of Mama Piranha have been presented by Morven Moves at the Morven Museum, a GALLIM artist residency showing at the Chelsea Factory, and by Pioneers Go East as part of the Crossroads Festival. Hagan anticipates the premiere of the work in its entirety in 2024.
Cara is grateful to have received financial support from various organizations and institutions to continue her work. Recent support has included The New School Office of Faculty Research, GALLIM Dance, and the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron where she was named the inaugural Community Commissioning Residency Artist for the 2020/2021 season. Past support has come from the Dance Films Association, the Filmed in NC Fund, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Forsyth County Arts Council, the Appalachian State University Research Council, the Watauga County Arts Council, and Betty’s Daughter Arts.
Hagan is editor and contributor to the anthology Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom, published in 2021 by Routledge. Hagan is author of the book Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial practice, published in 2022 by McFarland. Cara Joined the faculty of The New School in 2022 and works as Associate Professor and Program Director for the MFA in Contemporary Theatre Performance.
Dr Joanne 'Bob' Whalley serves as the Director of Doctoral Training and Development in the Doctoral School at University of the Arts London UK, where she leads the development and delivery of a cohesive, cross-university doctoral training and development programme. Recognised internationally as a leading figure in the field of practice as research, Bob has dedicated over twenty years to guiding and supporting students at undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral levels, across the diverse spectrum of contemporary arts. As a fervent advocate for the artist-researcher's journey, she considers herself to be an artivist (artist + activist) teacher with a student-centred practice. As practitioner-scholar, Bob's research is situated at the intersection of a variety of disciplines, with a specific focus on the affective space that exists between the audience and the artwork. Her publications and practice are similarly interdisciplinary, exploring topics including practice as research, the dynamics of audience-performer interaction, and the medical humanities. Her most recent work considers the potential for affective exchange in extended reality, and interrogates the assumed centrality of the human subject.
Professor Lee Miller is Professor of Performance at Falmouth University, where he works within Research and Knowledge Exchange as Head of Postgraduate Research. His research focuses on audience / performer interaction, body-based live arts, site-specific performance, and affective exchange. As a practitioner-scholar his research takes multiple forms, both as traditional textual outputs alongside performance outcomes. He is the lead of the Centre for Blended Realities, which utilises shared technologies to foster excellence in collaborative research with a vision to blend innovation in the arts with cutting-edge computer science in the pursuit of new creative endeavours and knowledge generation. He is particularly interested in the dramaturgical affordances of working with volumetric capture, and what this might mean for questions of presence.
The Keynote Abstracts [PDF] have been uploaded.
