Joanne is festival coordinator for London at Shakespeare Schools Festival, and has worked with the Festival since 2011. She supports the 140 schools taking part in the festival in the Capital, as well as facilitating SSF creative workshops. A theatre practitioner, writer and researcher with a background in inclusive practice, Joanne studied at Oxford University, and now uses theatre to create new communities, encourage social inclusion and develop literacy. Her previous work has taken her to Finland, where she taught English through site specific theatre on the edge of a frozen lake, to France, where she helped teenagers on the autistic spectrum to reflect on their difficulties with sleep in a room of 100 pillows, to New York City, where she researched engagement with social issues through theatre on a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellowship, and back to her native London, where she wrote a new musical for a cast of 100 young people of all abilities in Tottenham.
Shakespeare Schools Festival uses the unique power of Shakespeare to transform lives. The world’s largest youth drama festival, it uses a rigorous and supportive process to train teachers and young people in an active and ambitious way of working with and performing Shakespeare. Months of preparation culminate in exhilarating performance evenings in professional theatres.
I’m a theatre practitioner with a background in inclusive practice. Finding ways to create new communities through Drama, and making diverse groups of performers central to the process, has taken me on some great journeys: making theatre with teenagers in Finland, circus artists in France, playwrights in New York City and toddlers in Tottenham.
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