Dr Katherine Graham
Senior Lecturer in Theatre

Profile

Biography

My teaching and research build on ten years of experience as a theatre maker in the UK and Ireland, where I have worked primarily as a lighting, stage, and costume designer for new writing, devised work, and dance. Before joining the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at York I taught on BA and MA programmes at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, where I completed my PhD in 2018.

My research explores the dramaturgical, phenomenological, and affective roles of light in performance, in particular seeking to articulate the active and consequential impact of light within the ecology of live performance. I have published work about light in the Theatre and Performance Design Journal and in Contemporary Theatre Review.

I teach across a range of modules on the BA Theatre: Writing, Directing and Performance, where I am keen to share the spirit of experiment that underpins all of my professional work as well as to encourage real depth of critical engagement and research.

Research

Overview

My primary research interests include: scenography, lighting design, performance aesthetics; dramaturgy, object oriented ontology and its applications to performance. My research explores the dramaturgical, phenomenological, and affective roles of light in performance, in particular seeking to articulate the active and consequential impact of light within the ecology of live performance. I am especially interested in the audience experience of light and in
using auto-ethnographic approaches to investigate the ways in which light works in performance.

Publications

Full publications list

Journal articles

‘In the Shadow of a Dancer: Light as dramaturgy in contemporary performance’ in Contemporary Theatre Review, 28:2 (June 2018)

‘Active Roles of Light in Performance Design’ in Theatre and Performance Design, 2:1-2 (June 2016

Selected conference papers

‘Landscapes of Light; an aesthetics of sensual encounter’, TaPRA annual conference, 2018.

‘Coming out of the Dark: gestural light in Pan Pan Theatre’s All That Fall’, TaPRA annual conference, 2017.

‘In Visible Light – feeling vision in scenographic light’, Performing Light Symposium, University of Leeds, 2017.

‘Documents of affect: accessing spectator experience through field notes’, TaPRA annual conference, 2016.

‘Chiaroscuro, perception and expression; a pre-history of scenographic light’IFTR annual conference, 2016.

PhD Thesis

Scenographic Light: Towards an Understanding of Expressive Light in Performance. 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/20414/