ABI WEAVER is an award-winning producer/director who has worked across a range of visual media from independent feature documentaries to programming for major UK broadcasters. Her research develops a critical analysis of the voice in documentary interviews. This research is informed by her work conducting extensive interviews with ex-fighters from the Lebanese Civil War for her latest co-directed film About a War (Rugo-Weaver 2018, Lebanon/UK). Abi is a TECHNE-funded doctoral candidate at the University of Surrey and an affiliate of the Centre for Lebanese Studies. She is consultant on academic research projects using documentary interview methods as tools for research and dissemination.
POLLY HEMBER is a techne funded PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her thesis focuses on modernism, visual culture and affective networks, exploring the work of the POOL group. She is a former postgraduate representative for BAMS, a former co-editor of the Modernist Review and currently co-convenes the Following the Affective Turn lecture series and the techne graduate podcast.
VERENA LERCHER has a background of 15 years in professional stage play and off-production performance. She is developing and performing her own pieces since 2016. In 2021 she started her PhD in artistic research at the University of Roehampton London that has been awarded the TECHNE scholarship. Her doctoral studies engage with the understanding of the (im)materiality of voice. By developing an aesthetic practice, she wants to introduce artificial voice as a creative medium – a (real-time) artistic partner for the production of media-specific vocal artefacts potentially detached from identifiable, cultural, social or historical references.
FLORENCE FITZGERALD-ALLSOPP is a Techne funded PhD researcher at the University of Surrey. Her research engages with the area of 'interspecies performance,' in which contemporary artists explore human-animal entanglements through embodied performance practice. Dwelling theoretically at the intersection of performance studies, animal studies, and feminist scholarship, she considers how these emergent practices might contribute to an interspecies feminism - a feminism produced by the ethically oriented practice of being-in-relation with animals, as a non-anthropocentric mode of resistance in times of socio-ecological crisis. She is also currently editing a forthcoming book on 'Interspecies Performance' with Prof. Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca.
ROSALIND HOLGAE SMITH is a Dance Artist, Choreographer and Movement Educator. She creates performances, installations and visual artworks that investigate intimate experiences between people, place and the environment. She takes inspiration from working with touch, raw materials, outdoors and in water, as well as somatic movement practices including Contact Improvisation, Body-Mind Centering® and Authentic Movement. She holds a Masters in Dance Creative practice and a BA (hons) in Fine Art & Choreography and is currently a techne PhD scholarship student, based at Kingston University, where she is investigating touch as an encounter with Otherness.