Claire MacDonald

UK, Research Practitioner

Theatre writer, editor and theatre practitioner and, more recently, a Unitarian minister in training,

After university in Leeds Claire co-founded Impact Theatre Cooperative, and worked for ten years as a performer and maker. She subsequently took up a Judith Wilson Fellowship at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and has since combined research, writing, curating and teaching, in the UK at Dartington College of Arts and De Montfort University and, currently, at Goldsmiths University where she is convening the MA in Performance Making for 2015/16, in the US (where Claire lived for eight years) she directed the programme in InterArts at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

Claire has held positions as Director of the International Centre for Fine Art Research at University of Arts London and, most recently, at the Norwegian Theatre Academy where she remains an Associate Professor of Research. Claire has a strong interest in methodologies of research, and in pedagogical research and has been a member of the ARHC Peer Review College, and worked as a consultant and advisor to Higher Education programmes in the Netherlands and Scandinavia as well as the US and the UK.

Claire’s writing embraces the critical creative divide, and her PhD, BETWEEN WRITING AND PERFORMANCE, explored the journey between theatre writing and narrative fiction. As a critic Claire writes about visual artists, theatre practice as well as writers whose interests cross disciplines, experimental textualities, artists’ books, publishing and the pedagogy of art and performance. Claire is on on the Board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, in New York, and is co-founder of the interdisciplinary arts journal, Performance Research and joined VDT’s Board of Directors in 2016. Claire also co-hosts The Table with Charlotte Vincent. She lives in London.