Sarah Scofield, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing
Sarah Schofield is an award-winning writer of short fiction. Her stories have appeared in several Comma Press anthologies, Best British Short Stories 2020 (Salt), Synaesthesia Magazine, Morning Star, Woman’s Weekly, Hinterland and many others. Sarah is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. Her debut collection Safely Gathered In was published by Comma Press in November 2021
Dr Michelle Man, Senior Lecturer in Dance
Dr Michelle Man (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Dance, and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, with a career as a performer, choreographer, pedagogue, advisor, and mentor that spans over thirty-five years and across a range of professional, institutional and community organizations worldwide. Of British/Asian heritage, Michelle’s practice research and work is rooted in an ethos of care, compassion, and celebration of other. Her performance making is grounded in interdisciplinary and collective methodologies, working extensively with circus artists, lighting designers, architects, composers, musicians, costume designers, and multi-media artists. Her work has been seen Brazil, Canada, Chile, Korea, Lithuania, and across Europe and the UK.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0715-6003
https://research.edgehill.ac.uk/en/persons/michelle-man
Ciara O’Neill, Doctoral Researcher.
Ciara O’Neill is a PhD practice-based researcher in Creative and Performing Arts at Edge Hill University. She holds a First-Class Honours degree in Performing Arts from Liverpool Hope University and an MA by Creative Practice, awarded with Distinction. Her research and creative work have consistently focused on Irish theatre, with particular emphasis on theatre from the North of Ireland and the representation of women within this context. Her practice is informed by autobiographical methodologies, situating personal experience as a critical lens within her research. In addition to her academic work, she is an active freelance performer.
Dr Rowena Gander, Lecturer in Dance.
Dr Rowena Gander is a Liverpool-based performance artist, choreographer, and educator known for bold solo works and publications that explore power, lesbian sexuality, and female objectification. Her acclaimed pieces Barely Visible and Woman | Women have toured nationally, confronting lesbian invisibility through raw physicality. Rowena has previously reperformed the timeless work of Marina Abramović at her solo retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as her latest acclaimed work Balkan Erotic Epic.
Alongside making and performing her own and others’ work, Rowena has choreographed numerous musical theatre productions, as well as movement directing / support on small and large scale physical theatre and cabaret productions. Rowena has been in receipt of grant awards from Arts Council England, Liverpool Improvisation Festival, Leap Dance Festival, Word of Warning & hÅb, Metal Culture UK, Physical Fest, and Unity Theatre’s Open Call. Rowena has work with celebrated directors and choreographers, including Blenard Azijaz, Izzie Major, Elinor Randle, Jenny Rees, Jen Hale, Jo Fong, Alexandra Pirici, Manuel Pelmus, Dawn Schultz, and Pauline Brooks. Other collaborations include Noel Jones on numerous digital performance projects, and Phil Saunders on lighting design.
Jenna Gardner, Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design.
Jenna Gardner is Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Edge Hill University with almost 25 years of teaching and curriculum development experience in HE. Her practice focusses on participatory approaches, practice research, social design and she is passionate about stimulating closer working between education and industry. As such, Jenna creates environments for students to experience live projects, engage with external organisations and experience transdisciplinary working; aimed at boosting their employability prospects and to encourage entrepreneurial thinking. Much of her creative andprofessional practice involves collaborative design projects utilising co-design approaches involving students, community groups and other stakeholders in the process.
Dr Chris Green, Lecturer and group co-convenor.
Chris is a queer artist and researcher working collaboratively with Katheryn Owens as greenandowens. In 2023 they completed a fully collaborative practice research PhD at the University of Plymouth, that used an expanded definition of performance writing to understand autoethnographic experiences of millennial precarity, using friendship as a method to do this. Following on from this, they are exploring human-water relationships: the body and writing, swimming, our bodies made of water, access to water and leisure, and how we work with water. Whilst in its early stages, it is intended that this work takes an interdisciplinary practice research approach, using performance, sound, text, and sculpture as artistic outputs.
Dr Kim Wiltshire, Reader / Programme Leader in Creative Writing, group co-convenor.
Dr Kim Wiltshire is a dramatist, fiction writer and academic, with much of her creative work being political, issue-based or exploring health and well-being. Plays include: Polarised (2004 – Burnley Youth Theatre), about the 2001 race riots (later adapted as a film for schools); The Loser (2009) for Scenepool at Camden People’s Theatre; Sing When You’re Winning (2010) for Bolton Octagon; Joy With Child (2010) for Organised Chaos in Manchester (shortlisted for the 2009 Bruntwood Prize); Triple The Price Of Fruitcake as part of the Come Closer event at the Royal Exchange (2015). In 2014, supported by Bolton Octagon and Arts Council England, she toured Project XXX, a multimedia play, and in Autumn 2017, The Value of Nothing, directed by Joyce Branagh, toured the North West and the Midlands, with both published by Aurora Metro. In December 2015 her book, Writing For Theatre: Creative and Critical Approaches, was published by Palgrave Macmillan, and in September 2018 the book she co-edited and co-wrote with Billy Cowan, Scenes from the Revolution, was published by Pluto Books. Her chapter on ‘Revising, Dramaturgy and the Theatre Workshop’ was published in Creative Writing: Drafting, Revising and Editing in 2020.
One of Kim’s main areas of research interest is using arts for wellbeing, and she has over 20 years of experience as a community artist. In 2022 she was awarded a British Academy Innovation Fellowship to further explore her work in arts and health, running until October 2023; she has published articles on embedding the arts into healthcare settings in The Journal of Short Fiction in Practice and Theory (2022) and The Journal of Applied Arts and Health (2023) and a chapter in Structural and Systemic Perspectives on Health and Well-being (2026). In 2023/2024 she ran a Practice as Research AHRC funded Arts and Health creative writing project called Home from Home in Manchester, using poetry to explore the liminal space between acute care and home care in health settings. She had a chapter on nostalgia and masculinity in The Uses of the Past in Contemporary Western Popular Culture in 2024 by Palgrave McMillan, and she has had three short stories published by Amphibian Literary journal, a creative non-fiction piece in Antenna journal and a comedy monologue on the Funny Pearls website.
Dr Lena Šimić, Reader in Drama and PGR co-ordinator.
Dr Lena Šimić is a Reader in Drama at Edge Hill University. Originally from Dubrovnik, Croatia, she now lives in Liverpool, United Kingdom. Her research areas include contemporary performance practice, political performance, live art, art activism, feminist theatre and performance, life writing, and critical arts practice in relation to the climate crisis, ecology, and the environment. She is a performance practitioner working with the teaching methodologies of ‘embodied practice’ and ‘practice as research’ in performance and theatre studies. Lena was engaged in the AHRC-funded Performance and the Maternal (2019–2022) project, which resulted in a number of publications, including Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations (Palgrave, 2021) and the edited collection Mothering Performance: Maternal Action (Routledge, 2022). More recently, funded by the British Academy, she completed the project Imagining Climate Future Narratives (2024–2026), which explored climate futures in relation to audio plays and the facilitation of listening events. She is currently researching menopause aesthetics, feminist ageing, and life writing practices.
