International Collaborations

Lilia Mestre is a Portuguese performing artist living and working in Brussels. In her work she uses choreographic tools to research issues related to perception, culture and relationality.  Since 1994 she has worked as a dancer and collaborator namely with Vera Mantero, Hans Van den Broeck, Christine de Smedt, Martin Nachbar, Kate Machintosh and Mette Edvardsen. In 1999 she founded the company Random Scream with Davis Freeman to expose the eclectic elements of everyday culture with proposed lines of flight for dance, theatre, and other media.

Lisa Busby is a Scottish composer, vocalist, and improviser based in London. Situated across experimental music, performance art, and pop song, her practice often utilises the found and the prosaic, and manifests in various entangled modes – long-duration and site specific work, video, non-standard scoring/notation, “anti-production” techniques for electronic music, and live improvisation for sound/body. Currently, Lisa is one of Sound and Music’s New Voices.

Katie Overy is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Director of the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development (IMHSD) at the University of Edinburgh. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to research, particularly across the fields of music psychology, music neuroscience and music pedagogy. She has co-edited several interdisciplinary special issues on the musical, rhythmic brain, including for Transactions of the Royal Society B (2015), Cortex (2009) and Contemporary Music Review (2009). She was the UK partner in the EC Marie Curie International Training Network EBRAMUS (Europe, Brain and Music) and was Visiting Professor in Music Education at Western University, Canada from 2014-6, where she led a new initiative, Musical Learning Across the Lifespan (MLAL), which brings together researchers and students from music, cognitive neuroscience and audiology.

Christophe de Bézenac is a researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Liverpool with a particular interest in the dynamics of social interaction in mental health and illness. His PhD research examined the neural correlates of ambiguity in self-other agency in relation to hallucination proneness using fMRI. Following previous studies at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg, ethnomusicological research in Indonesia, and a first PhD in music, he is a cultural fellow at the University of Leeds (conducting and facilitating arts-science collaboration) and has lectured in performance and composition at a number of higher education institutions whilst actively involved in the European jazz and digital art scenes.

Hanne De Jaegher is the Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain.  As a philosopher of mind and cognitive science, her work has focused on how we think, work, and play—basically: live and love—together. She has developed the enactive theory of intersubjectivity called participatory sense-making. To further elaborate this theory, she work together with colleagues across a wide range of disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, autism research, education, therapeutic practices, the arts, ethics, neuroscience, psychiatry, feminism, and diversity studies find it useful to apply the concepts and methodologies of participatory sense-making to their research and practices.

Beatrice Allegranti  is an Italian-Irish choreographer, dance movement psychotherapist, capoeira teacher,  feminist researcher and educator based in London and Florence.  Her international experience spans over two decades and encompasses choreography and filmmaking as well as teaching (actors, dancers and psychotherapists), clinical practice and supervision (in the NHS and privately) and consultancy. Feminist Posthumanism informs her practice and her collaborations exist at the intersections of biomedical, scientific and philosophical understandings of dance, choreography and moving bodies in relationship. 

John Harries is a drummer, electronic musician and producer, with specific interests in collective improvisation, systems/process-based approaches to electronic music performance, intersections of pop and experimental musics, noise, randomness, disorder... In 2013, he formed Rutger Hauser, currently his principal creative outlet - a many-headed alt-rock/improv/no wave group incorporating playback media (turntables, cassettes, tape), DIY electronics and cello alongside guitar, bass and drums.

Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator. Since January 2018 she is documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel (School of Art and Design Kassel). From 2012 to 2018 she was professor for Curating and Mediating Art at the Aalto University in Helsinki. Since 2011, she has been a member of freethought, a platform for research, education, and production (London). In this capacity she was also one of the artistic directors of the Bergen Assembly 2016. She publishes texts on contemporary art, exhibitions, politics of history, educational theory, and anti-racism.

Struan Leslie is a Director, Movement Director, Choreographer, Dramaturg and Teacher.  His work is notable for it’s cross art form dialogues from opera and Shakespeare to landscape architecture and circus creating transdisciplinary work. Over 35 years he has refined a practice which brings together the fundamentals of movement and creativity to make new and devised work, interpret extant repertoire and teach.  He trained in dance and choreography at London Contemporary Dance School and the Naropa Institue, Colorado.  From 2009 to 2014 he was the founding Head of Movement at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, PhD is an independent art curator and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of the art space SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of the journal SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. 

Donna McCormack is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. Her main research interests are biotechnologies in contemporary literature and film, evolutionary theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory. Her first monograph is entitled Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (Bloomsbury Press, 2014), and she has publications in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Somatechnics and BMJ Medical Humanities, as well as in edited collections such as Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing (London: Routledge, 2015).  She is the coordinator of the Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health, as well as a founding member of the Monster Network.  She is currently working on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship on Transplant Imaginaries.

Nordic Network of Gender Body Health Established in 2008, the Nordic Network for Gender, Body, Health provides a platform for researchers and practitioners working across a diverse set of academic and professional backgrounds from medicine, comparative literature and sociology to philosophy, psychiatry, anthropology, sports and health sciences, and history of science. The network is currently hosted by the Department of Ethnology, History of Religion and Gender Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Lisa Folkmarson Käll is an Associate Professor of Gender Science in the Department of Ethnology, History of Religion and Gender Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include feminist philosophy, especially phenomenology and philosophy of subjectivity, body / embodiment theory, sexual difference theory, intersectionality, “new materialism”,  film philosophy.  Between 2007 and 2012, she worked as a researcher at the Center for Gender Science, Uppsala University, where she was the coordinator of the body / Embodiment research group within the framework of the GenNa Excellence program funded by the Swedish Research Council. In 2012-2014, she worked at the Center for Dementia Research (CEDER), Linköping University with a project on subjectivity and intersubjectivity in relation to age-related dementia disease.

Margrit Sheldrik is a Guest Professor in Gender and Knowledge Production at the University of Stockholm, having previously worked at Tema Genus, the unit for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at Linköping University.  Her research Given my varied academic qualifications in literature, bioethics, and poststructuralist philosophy.  She has held academic posts in the UK, Ireland, Canada, USA and Australia, and currently she is also Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto, Visiting Professor in the Dept. of Law at UTS, Sydney, and Honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy, University of Liverpool.

Claire Todd is an artist and researcher working in glass and ceramic sculpture drawing and object-led performance.  She researches and makes sculptural costume, models, drawings and public artworks that address the body as a shared ecological and social state of transformation.  My recent practice led PhD in Applied Art (ceramics, glass and woven textile) was titled: 'Making and Movement: creating kinesthetic narratives through applied art practice', is anchored in the intimate relationship of the applied arts to the human body and sensorium in motion. The research documented gestures of making to examine how tacit knowledge is held and transferred through material forms.

Festpillkollektivet Festspillkollektivet is the Bergen International Arts Festival's socially engaged arts programme that includes both private and public performances and projects outside of traditional concert venues.  Festspillkollektivet works on developing new ways of engaging people who have less access to the arts and have difficulties with attending the regular Festival performances.

MAMA, Mulitmedia Institute, Zagreb is a non-profit association working at the intersections of culture, arts, technology and activism. Since its early days it has organized around a multi-facetted community that weaves together interests in diverse cultural and social fields: 1) critically inflected digital arts, film, music and literature; 2) digital commons: free software, free culture and open access; 3) philosophy and theory; 4) cultural networking, advocacy and grass-root organizing; 5) protection of public domain and struggles for spatial justice.

FASA,  Festival Arte Sonoro Español

Off-Biennale, Budapest is an international contemporary art event, the largest civil, independent arts initiative in Hungary. Organized on a grassroots basis, OFF-Biennale is based on self-organization and a voluntary collaboration of artists, groups of artists, curators, gallerists, and collectors, among others. OFF supports the work of Hungarian artists and brings the international art scene closer to the Hungarian public.