DIRECTOR

Anna (BA, Dip Appl. Ethics, Mag., MA, PG Cert HE, PhD) has completed a PhD in the philosophy of addiction, engaging in the existential and phenomenological approach of Kierkegaard and Levinas at St. Mary’s University, London. Anna Is Comprehensive Classically trained Pilates instructor who studies with Holly Murray at Pi Studios London. She is a Somatic Experiencing Trainee, currently completing SOS Internationale Intermediate Level II with Giselle Genillard. She has completed Ariel Giarretto’s workshop on ’Healing Sexual Trauma’. She directs and runs moment and arts-based workshops with The JAM Network UK, a creative community that supports survivors of human trafficking. With Christine Leroy, she co-runs the ’Movement and Care’ Colloquium series in association with MSH PARIS NORD.

Anna is a published poet and musician. She has written two books in philosophy (An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction, Bloomsbury; Embodied Healing and Trauma, Routledge) and a chapbook of poetry (Afar, Hardscrabble Press). Anna has lectured at Richmond, The American University in London and St. Mary's University, Canterbury Christ Church University and London School of Theology, and has been a research affiliate with the University of Kent. She is currently a Lecturer at St. Mellitus College, East Midlands, Visiting Lecturer and Honorary Visiting Fellow at St. Mary’s University, Bakhita Centre for Research on Slavery, Exploitation and Abuse.

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Christine is a French Philosophy Teacher, agrégée de Philosophie, PhD in Aesthetics from Paris I/Panthéon-Sorbonne University, also graduate (Master Degree) in Politic Science. Dr. Leroy works on Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of dance-drama. Her first book, published in 2018, focused on intentionality in phenomenology. Her second monograph, entitled Phénoménologie de la danse. De la chair à l'éthique was published in 2021 at Hermann Publishers and is about kinaesthetic empathy. She's now finalizing two books: the first one will be published in October at Atlande Publishers and is about the boundaries of the lived-body; the second one is a collective which focuses on up-holding practices and care ethics.

Christine was a former dancer (ballet, contemporary dance) and still practices contact-dance improvisation, as well as drama.

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Verónica Cohen holds a PhD in History and Theory of Arts at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires and the Centre of Contemporary Arts, University of Lille. Her research is interdisciplinary insofar as it combines elements of phenomenology, dance studies, and body studies. As an artist, her works are influenced by buto dance training. She is working on a project to better understand the role of verbal expression in dance. By considering verbal expression as integral to the development of dance practices as dynamic processes, the project will help us to answer two associated questions: how is verbal expression embodied? And how are dance practices shared among practitioners and outsiders? Studying this would be relevant not only for dance practices but also for sports, yoga and martial arts.

AFFILIATE

Bettina Bergo is a Professor of philosophy at Université de Montréal. She is the author of Anxiety: A Philosophical History (Oxford, 2021), Levinas between Ethics and Politics and co-editor of five collections, notably Levinas and Nietzsche: After the Death of a Certain God (Columbia, 2008), Trauma: Reflections on Experience and Its Other (SUNY, 2009), Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (2002), Levinas’s Contribution to Contemporary Thought (double issue of the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 1999). She translated three works of Levinas, Of God who Comes to Mind (1998); God, Death and Time (2000), and On Escape (2003). She also translated Marlène Zarader’s The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage (Stanford 2006), co-translated the proceedings of the Paris conference entitled Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida (Fordham, 2007), and Didier Franck’s Nietzsche and the Shadow of God (Northwestern, 2012), as well as over 20 articles and chapters. Her manuscript The Missed Conversation: Freud, Husserl, Consciousness and Unconsciousness is under review.

ARTIST

Alketa Xhafa Mripa is an internationally recognised artist and activist whose work deals with human rights, identity, memory, gender and migration, among others. She has been active for over 15 years through various mixed media public installations, painting, video and photography. Alketa is also one of Kosovo’s most influential voices who through her art and activism has contributed to empowering women and stigmatised communities.

Alketa moved to London in 1997 to study Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, becoming a refugee when the 1998–9 Kosovo war broke out. Since then, she has displayed her multi-faceted work in exhibitions across Europe including Germany, France, UK, Italy, Portugal, Luxembourg, Austria, Sweden, Albania and her native Kosovo, where she gained wider recognition for her art installation ‘Thinking of You’ in 2015. 

Collaboration and participation are essential to Alketa's work. Involving communities and society in general is always important for her and she believes that art has more importance when others are involved.

She says 'where language fails, art can break through'.

Alketa currently lives in London working across art projects both in Europe and worldwide continuing to fight for equality, justice and difference.

DANCE ARTIST

Matilda Tonkin Wells is a dance artist from west Wales, sharing her time between the UK and Israel-Palestine. Her work centres on establishing sustainable relationships to self, others and the world in which we dwell. She is a trained body-based psychotherapist and draws on her experiences of accompaniment in her creative projects. Her practice weaves together improvisation and instant composition with writing, drawing and film. She is currently developing a project relating to the entangled nature of grief and joy. She is interested in the transformative quality of making space and how improvised performance can emerge and unfold as ritualistic offerings to the world.

Her interest in facilitation, therapy and creative and embodied practice emerged through being involved in social justice movements. She is passionate about supporting the nourishment and sustainability of communities through creating spaces of belonging, collaboration and dialogue. She has worked in a range of different charity and third sector settings using integrative methods of trauma informed body-based therapy and expressive arts.

She is the Co-Artistic Director of thisPlace, a trauma-informed dance theatre company based in Wales.