Christine Balt 

Christine is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include interdisciplinary applications of applied theatre, performance, audience research and drama education in studies of ecologies, place, and urban environments. Her current research engages with how youth are using performance to claim a right to the city during the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis.

Claire French

Claire is a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick. She investigates analytical and methodological approaches to making multilingual performance while developing practices that privilege the storyteller in their unique social, epistemological and interactional context. She is currently completing the monograph Making multilingual performance: Omission, alignment, disruption for Routledge. French comes from a migrant Irish Australian heritage and has lived and made work in Germany, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia.

Jennifer completed her PhD with The University ofWarwick in 2018. Her research focused on the social justice implications of playful, ensemble approaches to teaching Shakespeare via an ethnographic case study of Coram Shakespeare School Foundation. She has published and presented widely on play, social justice and active Shakespeare pedagogy: her monograph Critical Pedagogy and Active Shakespeare is out with Cambridge University Press later this year. Jennifer has also worked for many years as a theatre education practitioner, focusing on Shakespeare, storytelling, early years and work in heritage theatre spaces. She is currently based in Scotland, and teaches at The Universities of Warwick, Glasgow and Highlands and Islands.

Adelina Ong

Adelina is an early career applied performance researcher based at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (London, UK). She writes about Compassionate Mobilities (a theory for negotiated living developed from her practice as part of her PhD), death and AI chatbots for mental wellbeing. Her place practices are inspired by cosplay, Death Cafes, D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) and urban arts (parkour, Art du Déplacement (the art of displacement), breakin’ (breakdancing) and graffiti). She has published in Theatre Research International and Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance (RiDE).