Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.
Ron Athey is an American performance artist associated with body art and with extreme performance art. He has performed in the U.S. and internationally. Athey's work explores challenging subjects like the relationships between desire, sexuality and traumatic experience. Many of his works include aspects of S&M in order to confront preconceived ideas about the body in relation to masculinity and religious iconography.
Tim Etchells is an English artist and writer based in Sheffield and London. Etchells is the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, an experimental performance company founded in 1984. He has published several works of fiction, written about contemporary performance and exhibited his visual art projects in various locations. Etchells' work spans performance, video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. He is currently Professor of Performance and Writing at Lancaster University.
Anne Bean is a London-based artist who works in installation, large-scale sculpture, sound art, and performance art. She was born in Livingstone in Northern Rhodesia. She lives in Limehouse in the East End of London.
Endurance art is a kind of performance art involving some form of hardship, such as pain, solitude or exhaustion. Performances that focus on the passage of long periods of time are also known as durational art or durational performances.
Adrian Heathfield is a British writer and curator.
Forced Entertainment is an experimental theatre company based in Sheffield, England, founded by Tim Etchells in 1984.
Lois Keidan is a British-born cultural activist and writer. She co-founded the Live Art Development Agency with Catherine Ugwu in 1999 and was the Director of the Agency until 2021. She was the former director of live arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) from 1992 to 1997. Prior to working at the ICA, she was responsible for national policy and provision for Performance Art and interdisciplinary practices at the Arts Council of Great Britain.
The Long Table is an "experimental open public forum that is a hybrid performance-installation-roundtable-discussion-dinner-party designed to facilitate dialogue through the gathering together of people with common interests" developed by the artist and academic Lois Weaver. The Long Table is part of Weaver's Public Address Systems project, under the strand "Strategies for Engaging the Public Through the Everyday".
George Chakravarthi is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography, video, painting and performance. His work addresses the politics of identity including race, sexuality and gender, and also religious iconography among other subjects. He was born in India and moved to London, England in 1980.
Adrian Howells was a British performance artist associated with one-to-one performance and intimate theatre. He performed in the United Kingdom and internationally. He was a pioneer of one-to-one performance, in which an artist repeats and adapts a score for a performance for a single audience member, or audience-participant, and repeats the action serially across a run of several days. The process and outcomes in Howells' signature works were frequently modelled on activities associated with the service industries or the tertiary sector of the economy, such as washing the audience-participant's hair or clothes, or giving an audience-member a bath, replicating in some ways the labour of a hairdresser, laundry worker, or caregiver; or he appropriated and adapted intimate interpersonal experiences in carefully mediated situations, like talking around a script or score in a setting such as a Japanese rock garden in The Garden of Adrian (2009), or holding hands, listening to music, and spooning in silence in Held (2008).
Qasim Riza Shaheen is a British artist and writer based in Manchester. Working across participatory performance, installation, film and photography, Shaheen's practice explores memory, notions of beauty, sexuality, love and, more broadly, fundamental concerns about human nature.
The Theatre and Performance Research Association, or TaPRA for short, is an academic organisation focusing on theatre, drama and performance. It was founded in 2005, largely in response to the 2001 RAE [Research Assessment Exercise]. Academics from drama and theatre departments at Kent, Leeds, Royal Holloway, Warwick, QMUL, Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham Trent, Bristol, Central School of Speech and Drama, Lancaster, Sheffield, Roehampton, Glasgow, Exeter and Trinity College, Dublin formed the initial steering group. In 2019, TaPRA became a company limited by guarantee.
Deirdre Heddon, is Professor of Contemporary Performance at the University of Glasgow (UK). She is a practice-based researcher and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as academic monographs and book-chapters. Her focus of interest is in autobiographical performance, site-specific performance and walking art.
Amy Sharrocks is a UK based live artist, sculptor, filmmaker and curator from London, England. Sharrocks' work focuses on collaboration and exchange, inviting people on journeys that they also help to create. She is known for large scale, live artworks in public places that use everyday activities, such as swimming or walking, in spectacular ways. Many of her artworks investigate the nature of cities, explore the importance of fluidity as a way of thinking, and question our constructs of city life. Her work has been supported by Arts Council England, The Live Art Development Agency and Artsadmin. Major works include SWIM (2007), a 50-person swim across London, and the ongoing Museum of Water (2013-Ongoing), a collection of over one thousand bottles of water from around the world.
The Walking Artists Network (WAN) is an international network dedicated to walking as a critical and artistic practice. It reflects an increased interest in walking art and the growth of the field. Based at the University of East London, it has over 700 members from across the globe. The network maintains an active email discussion community through JISCmail.
Cathy Turner is a British artist and researcher, specialising in dramaturgy, site-specific performance and walking art. She is a founder member of Wrights & Sites, and a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter. Turner's practice and research explore how one's life experience can influence one's perception of their environment.
Katherine Araniello was a London-based live art, performance and video artist, who responded to the negative representation of disability. She used a range of mediums including film, large scale production and live art performances. Araniello was a member of The Disabled Avant-Garde (DAG) with deaf artist Aaron Williamson.
Hayley Newman is a London-based artist and Reader in Fine Art, who was born in Guildford, Surrey, in 1969. She is known for her work in performance art which has been exhibited since the early 1990s at venues including Tate Modern, the Ikon Gallery, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. She teaches at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. In 2004–2005 she was the Helen Chadwick Fellow at the British School in Rome.
Catherine Oliaku Ugwu is a British executive producer, artistic director, and consultant working in large-scale ceremonies and events, including for the Summer and Winter Olympics, the Summer Paralympics, the Asian, European, Islamic Solidarity, and Commonwealth Games, and the Millennium Dome.
