Director of the School of Film, Media & Performing Arts, Professor of Theatre & Film Education
Nigel Ward is the Director of the School of Film, Media & Performing Arts and Professor of Theatre & Film Education at the University for the Creative Arts.
Bio
Nigel graduated from Oxford University with a 1st Class Honours Degree in English Literature and later completed a PhD in Theatre Studies at Warwick University. He trained as a theatre director at Drama Studio London.
He began his career as a theatre director, and worked as an assistant director for the Royal Shakespeare Company based in Stratford on Avon. His work has been presented internationally, including the US, India, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Japan. He has led theatre workshops around the world, including for the British Council, and at conferences such as Performance Studies International, the Centre for Performance Research and the International Federation of Theatre Research.
Before taking up his current position Nigel has held roles at Sheffield University Wolverhampton and de Montfort Universities and led the MA Performance Studies at Central School of Speech and Drama.
Most recently he was at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge where he was Head of Department of Music and Performing Arts and was the first Head of the Cambridge School of Creative Industries.
Research statement
Nigel’s research includes practice as research and publications. It encompasses elements of theatre history as well as current performance practice and performance theory.
Research areas include:
- Avant garde theatre of the early twentieth century (especially Antonin Artaud and Alfred Jarry)
- Intercultural performance
- New performance technologies
- Theatre directing and its methodologies
- Popular theatre
Research Outputs:
Selected Practice as Research
- Here Be Dragons A new musical co-authored with Rebecca Applin Mumford Theatre, Cambridge 2015
- Secret Sharer devised performance presented as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2012
- Portraits of Artemisia written and directed by Nigel Ward Mumford Theatre Cambridge 2010
- The Silk Route Devised performance sponsored by the British Council, performed by Kinaetma Theatre in Calcutta, India 2004
- The Changing Room devised performance performed by Kinaetma Theatre Calcutta, India 2003
- Sita devised performance performed Arena Theatre Wolverhampton 2002
- Questa Sera devised performance performed Central School of Speech and Drama, London and Setkani Festival Brno 2000
- The 16 Phases of Kaspar devised performance, Teatro do Campo Alegre, Porto, Portugal 2000
Selected Publications
- The French Theatrical Avant Garde in Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, ed. Mark Evans & Rick Kemp 2016
- The transcultural body: Kolkata re-membered Studies in South Asian Film and Media, The Body: Indian Special Issue, Volume 4:2 July 2013
- The Death of the Actor Performance Research, Volume 15, No. 1 March 2010
- Fifty-one shocks of Artaud: Twelve shocks New Theatre Quarterly, Volume XV Part 2 (NTQ 58) May 1999
Selected Conference Papers
- Stanislavsky and the post-truth Society: 140 characters in search of an author The S Word: Merging Methodologies, DAMU Theatre Academy, Prague 2017
- Performing Culture and the Ethics of Spectatorship International Conference on Culture, Communication and Transnational Societies, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 2016
- Jarry in Time Performance Philosophy Conference, Chicago 2015
- Breathe Again, Breathe Later: when happenings happen again Performance Studies International, New York 2007
- Ovid in India Association for Asian Theatre, New Orleans, USA 2007
- The Silk Route: memory of a journey Performance Studies International, Brown University, USA 2005
Professional Membership, Affiliation and Consultancy
Nigel currently works as an external examiner for the MA/MFA Collaborative Theatre Making programme at Rose Bruford College and the BA Acting and Creative Practice at Northampton University.