Dr Maria Chatzichristodoulou

[aka Maria X]
Director of Postgraduate Studies, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance

Academic Profile

Maria Chatzichristodoulou joined SANM in 2009. Before that she taught theatre, performance and new media at the University of London Colleges Goldsmiths, Birkbeck and Queen Mary, Richmond the International American University in the UK, as well as the FE College WEA (2004-2009). Maria is a cultural practitioner who has worked as a curator, producer, performer, writer and community organiser in the UK, Greece and internationally (France, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Peru). She holds a PhD in Art and Computational Technologies from Goldsmiths, University of London on ‘Cybertheatres: Emergent Networked Performance Practices’ (2010) and a 1st class B.A. Hons in Theatre Studies from the University of Patras, Greece (1996).

Maria was co-founder and co-director of the 1st Hellenic Art and Technology Festival (1997) in Athens, Greece, which was renamed Medi@terra (1998). The Festival was co-organised with the Hellenic Ministries of Culture and Development and was part of the Cultural Olympiad. She was also co-director of Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (1996-2002), founding member of Thission: A Theatre for the Arts and the theatre collective Ludo Ergo Sum collective (Athens, Greece). In Athens, Greece, Maria worked as a performer with Diplous Eros theatre ensemble (1996-1998) and director Syllas Tzoumerkas (1998-2000), and as a producer with Omikron Theatre Company (1997-2000) and Prof. Manthos Santorineos (1998-2002). Before moving to the UK Maria was Resident Researcher at the Centre International de Creation Video (CICV) in Montpeliard, France on networked performance art (2002). While in the UK, Maria worked as Community Participation Officer at The Albany in London (2003–5). She was independent reporter for Arts Council London (2006–8) and collaborated with artist Alex Spyropoulos on the project Pink Tank (exhibited at Southbank Centre, London Design Festival, 2007).

Maria has collaborated with and contributed to numerous conferences and projects, such as: SIGGRAPH 2011 (Vancouver – reviewer); Impact 7: Intersection and Counterpoints International Conference 2011 (Monash University Australia – reviewer); Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization and Imaging 2010 (London – reviewer); Digital Resources in Humanities and the Arts (DRHA) conferences 2009 & 2010 (Belfast & London – programming committee); 3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts – DIMEA 2008 (Athens, Greece – tutorials co-chair and supervisor); Computational Models of Creativity in the Arts conference and exhibition (London, 2006 - organizing committee); Machinista Festival (Glasgow, 2004 – category supervisor).

In December 2007 Maria co-directed, with Rachel Zerihan, the 3-day festival and symposium Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Performance, which took place at Goldsmiths, Laban, The Albany, Home London and online, was funded by the AHRC Methods Network, Knowledge East and Goldsmiths, and featured 40 performances, workshops, seminars, a show-&-tell marathon and a symposium. Intimacy footage is available from the British Library and the Live Art Development Agency. (http://www.writing.gold.ac.uk/intimacy/) For years she co-programmed with Prof. Janis Jefferies and coordinated The Thursday Club series of events at Goldsmiths Digital Studios (2006-2010) (http://doc.gold.ac.uk/thethursdayclub/).

Maria is the recipient of three awards in Innovation in Teaching and Learning (University of Hull), either as a leader or as a collaborator. In 2009-10 she received, with David Overton (Scarborough School of Education) an award for the interdisciplinary project ‘Performing Science in Schools’, which explored the use of performance methods for the delivery of scientific concepts in schools. In 2010-11 Maria led, with Dr. Toni Sant, the project ‘How to Build your World’ that looked into the use of virtual worlds, and Second Life in particular, in the delivery of Theatre and Performance programmes. This led to the symposium From Black Box to Second Life (Scarborough, May 2011). In 2011-12 Maria collaborates with Dr. Sant in a project that examines the use of wiki software for collaborative assessment. Currently, Maria collaborates with the Deptford.TV collaborative film-making project as a producer (http://www.deptford.tv) and the online journal Digicult as free-lance writer. She is co-founder and curator of the Expanded Play lab, launched in 2010 in London, UK and Zaragoza, Spain, and supported by Milla Digital (Spain). (http://www.expandedplay.com/about.html) Maria is also member of the ICP (Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Practices) Research Cluster at the University of Hull where she initiated and coordinates the working group Intimate Technologies (http://icpcluster.org/).

Maria’s writings on performance, technology, and new media have appeared in several publications and she has lectured widely at conferences and events. Maria sits on the programming committee of The Thursday Club (Goldsmiths) and on the Editorial Board of Body, Space & Technology online journal.

Teaching

At SANM, Maria teaches both theatre and performance and interdisciplinary modules. In 2010-11 she taught (or co-taught) the modules Performance Practice (Y1), Festival & Performance Criticism (Y2), Curating & Managing Live Arts (Y3), Applied & Interactive Theatre 2 (Y3) and Live Artsworks (Y3), for students in the Theatre & Performance and Media Performance programs. In the past she has taught the interdisciplinary modules Media Culture & Society (Y1) and Interdisciplinary Studies in Creativity (Y1) for Digital Media and Media Performance students. She also contributes to other modules across SANM, both UG and PG, such as Game Art & Design and Research Methods.

Maria is SANM’s Director of Postgraduate Studies and thus responsible for all postgraduate provision in the School across the areas of Theatre & Performance, Digital Media and Creative Music Technology. She is also Programme Leader for the MA by Research, MPhil and PhD in Theatre & Performance. She supervises research projects and independent study dissertations across SANM. Maria welcomes postgraduate research proposals in her areas of expertise.

Research Interests

• Digital & Networked Performance
• Digital Storytelling
• Applied & Interactive Theatre
• Live Art
• Media /Digital Arts
• Game Art
• Collaborative and Community Practices
• Social Media
• Curatorial Practices in Live Art, Digital Performance and Media Arts

Publications

Peer-reviewed

• With Kuksa, I., Childs, M. and Sant, T. (Eds) (forthcoming 2013) From Black Box to Second Life: Theatre and Performance in Virtual Worlds.
• With Zerihan, R. (Eds) (forthcoming 2012) Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance (London: Palgrave MacMillan).
• With Rachel, Z. ‘A Discussion on the Subject of Intimacy’ In Chatzichristodoulou, M. and Zerihan, R. (Eds) (forthcoming 2012) Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance. (London: Palgrave MacMillan)
• ‘Presence, Pattern, and the Original Body in Networked Encounters’ In Sunden, J. and Hughes, R. (Eds) (2011) Second Nature: Reproduction and the Artificial in Art, Science and New Media (Stockholm: Axl Books), pp. 99-122.
• ‘Annie Abrahams’s Experiments in Intimacy’, GenderForum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies, 31, December 2010, http://www.genderforum.org/issues/gender-and-performance/gender-and-performance/ [accessed 10 January 2012]
• With Overton, D. ‘The Teaching of Science Through the Performing Arts’, Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2:2, 2010, pp. 3871–3875.
• ‘Where is the There of Cybertheatres?’ In Quaresma, J. and Dias. P. R. (Eds) (2010) Circunvoluções Digitais Vol. II: Arte, Design e Plataformas Virtuais (Lisbon: IEBA – Secção Ciberarte Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa), pp. 61-83.
• ‘Curating Technocultures [2010]’ In Lambert, N., Gardiner, J. and Franco, F. (Eds) (2010) CAT 2010: Ideas Before Their Time. Connecting the Past and Present in Computer Art. Conference Proceedings. (London: Computer Art and Technocultures AHRC Project), pp. 166-171.
• With Jefferies, J. and Zerihan, R. (Eds) (2009) Interfaces of Performance (London: Ashgate).
• ‘How to Kidnap your Audiences: An Interview with Blast Theory’ In Chatzichristodoulou, M., Jefferies, J. and Zerihan, R. (Eds) (2009) Interfaces of Performance (London: Ashgate), pp. 107-118.
• ‘Telling the Tale of Tales’ In Hartley, J. and McWilliam, K. (Eds) (2009) Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World (New York: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 221-229.
• ‘When Presence-Absence Becomes Pattern-Randomness: Blast Theory's Can You See Me Now?’ In Bentkowska-Kasel, A., Cashen, T. and Gardiner, H. (Eds) (2009) Art History, Curation and Practice after Media. Computers and the History of Arts, Volume 3. (London: Intellect), pp. 79-88.
• ‘When Presence and Absence Turn Into Pattern and Randomness: Can You See Me Now?’, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 16:4-5, Special Issue: Dispersive Anatomies, 2009, http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/DispersiveAnatomies/DispersiveAnatomies.html [accessed 10 January 2012]
• ‘Strategies of Sharing: the Case-study of Deptford.TV’, Body, Space & Technology, 7:1, 2007, http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol0701/home.html [accessed 7 April 2010]

Reviews

• ‘Mapping Intermediality in Performance edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 21:2, 2011, pp. 230-1
• ‘Move: Choreographing You. Art and Dance Exhibition’, Digimag, 61, February 2011, http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1988 [accessed 10 January 2012]
• ‘New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art edited by Christiane Paul’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 6:2, October 2010, p. 225.
• ‘Performance, All Over the Map: On Chris Salter’s Entangled’, Rhizome, 4 August 2010, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/aug/4/performance-all-over-the-map-on-chris-salters-enta/ [accessed 10 January 2012]
• ‘If Not You Not Me: Annie Abrahams and Life in the Networks’, Digimag, 54, May 2010, http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1793 [accessed 10 January 2012]
• ‘Opera Calling’, Furtherfield.org, 2 April 2007, http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews/opera-calling [accessed 10 January 2012]

Other Publications

• [commissioned]: Contribution of entries to: Didier, B. (forthcoming 2012) Le Dictionnaire des Femmes Créatrices (Paris: Les Editions des Femmes).
• ‘Annie Abrahams: Allergic to Utopias’, Digimag, 58, October 2010, http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1902 [accessed 10 January 2012]
• With Hadzi, A. ‘Strategies of Sharing: the Case-study of the Deptford.TV Project’ In Yiakoumaki, N. and Karaba, E. (Eds) (2007) Feedback 0.4 (London: OpenMute).
• [commissioned]: ‘From Entropy8Zuper! To Tale of Tales: Games and the Endless Forest, Part 2’, Furtherfield.org, 16 October 2007, http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=287 [accessed 10 January 2012]
• [commissioned]: ‘From Entropy8Zuper! To Tale of Tales: Games and the Endless Forest’, Furtherfield.org, 7 August 2007, http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=283 [accessed10 January 2012]
• [commissioned]: ‘Ginger’, Stradda Le magazine de la création hors les murs, 2, April 2007.
• ‘Strategies of Sharing: Twelve Interviews’ In Deptford.TV (Eds) (2006) The Deptford.TV Diaries (London: OpenMute), pp. 10-27.
• ‘Cybertheaters: Emergent, Hybrid, Networked Performance Practices’, Sklunk e-journal, 2, February 2006, http://www.sklunk.net/cybertheaters [accessed 7 April 2010]
• With Roussos, M. (Eds) (2001) Medi@terra 2001 Festival Catalogue (Athens: Oxy).
• ‘What Time and Space Define the Infeasible?’ In Chatzichristodoulou, M. and Roussos, M. (Eds) (2001) Medi@terra 2001 Festival Catalogue (Athens: Oxy).
• ‘Views of Balkan Artscapes’ In (2000) Interferances Festival Catalogue (Montpeliard: CICV)
• ‘Greek Video Art’ In (2000) Video Art Festival of Lima Catalogue (Lima: Video Art Festival of Lima).
• (Ed) (2000) Medi@terra 2000 Festival Catalogue (Athens: Oxy).
• ‘Balkan Artscapes’ In Chatzichristodoulou, M. (ed.) (2000) Medi@terra 2000 Festival Catalogue (Athens: Oxy).
• (Ed) (1999) Medi@terra 1999 Festival Catalogue (Athens: Fournos Centre for Digital Culture).
• (Ed) (1998) 1st Hellenic Festival for Art & New Technologies Catalogue (Athens: Fournos Centre for Digital Culture).

Also

• Reviewer: Special Issue of International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media on Digital Opera (forthcoming Spring 2012).
• Advisory Committee: Digital Creativity, 18:1, Special Issue: Computational Models of Creativity in the Arts, 2007.

Conferences & Lectures

• Forthcoming - Invited Lecture: Waterman’s International Festival of Digital Arts, London (UK), July 2012.
• Speaker: Rewire Conference 2011, Liverpool (UK), September 2011.
• Speaker: ISEA (Inter-Society for Electronic Arts) 2011, Istanbul (Turkey), September 2011.
• Invited Lecture: Symposium on Telematic Theatre, Central School of Speech and Drama, London (UK), June 2011.
• Director and Speaker: From Black Box to Second Life Symposium, University of Hull, Scarborough (UK), May 2011.
• Invited Lecture: Lunch Bites, CultureLab, Newcastle University, Newcastle (UK), May 2011.
• Invited Lecture: Digital Stages Festival, London (UK), April 2011.
• Invited Lecture: Dance Technology and Circulations of the Social Version 2.0, MIT, Boston (USA), April 2011.
• Invited Lecture: LCC Speaker Series, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (USA), April 2011.
• Invited Lecture: ICP Research Cluster Launch, University of Hull, Scarborough (UK), February 2011.
• Invited Lecture: Research Seminar “On Interdisciplinarity”, Central School of Speech and Drama, London (UK), November 2010.
• Speaker: Performance Studies International Conference 2010, Toronto (Canada), June 2010.
• Invited Lecture: Computer Art and Technocultures, 2010: Ideas Before Their Time. Connecting the Past and Present in Computer Art Symposium. British Computer Society, London (UK), February 2010.
• Speaker: CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) Conference 2009, London (UK), November 2009.
• Invited Lecture: Digital Dance Summit, Yale University, New Haven (USA), October 2009.
• Speaker: InBetween Summer School, Delphi (Greece), July 2009.
• Invited Lecture: Creative Digital Media Research Practice: Production Through Exhibition Conference, CultureLab, Newcastle University, Newcastle (UK), March 2009.
• Speaker & Invited Chair: Performing Presence Conference, University of Exeter (UK), March 2009.
• Speaker: Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts (DRHA) Conference 2008, Cambridge (UK), October 2008.
• Invited Chair: 3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA) 2008, Athens (Greece), September 2008.
• Invited Chair: Balkanizing Taxonomy Conference, Goldsmiths, University of London, London (UK), May 2008.
• Invited Chair: Open Knowledge Conference, London School of Economics, London (UK), Spring 2008.
• Co-director and Speaker: Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Performance Symposium, Goldsmiths, University of London, London (UK), December 2007).
• Invited Lecture: Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Performance Presentation, Central School of Speech and Drama, London (UK), 2007.
• Speaker: Future Histories of the Moving Image Conference, University of Hull, Hull (UK), 2007.
• Speaker: Digital Resources in Humanities and the Arts (DRHA) Conference 2007, Dartington College of Arts, Dartington (UK), 2007.
• Speaker: CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) Conference 2006, London (UK), 2006.
• Speaker: Thursday Club series, “Deptford.TV” presentation, Goldsmiths, University of London, London (UK), 2006.
• Speaker: Journeys Across Media Conference, Reading (UK), 2006.
• Speaker: Forensic Futures: Interrogating the Posthuman Subject Open Forum, Birkbeck, University of London, London (UK), 2006.
• Speaker & Panel Chair: Thursday Club series, “Intimacy in Performance” Panel, Goldsmiths, University of London, London (UK), 2006.
• Speaker: Identities Postgraduate Conference, Goldsmiths, University of London, London (UK), 2006.
• Speaker: Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP) Conference 2005, Bristol (UK), 2005.
• Invited Lecture: Emergences Conference, IRCAM, La Villette, Paris (France), 2004.
• Speaker: Machinista Festival and conference, ICC, Glasgow (UK), 2004.
• Conference Director and Speaker: Medi@terra conferences, Belgrade (Serbia) and International Book Fair, Frankfurt (Germany), 2001.
• Invited Lecture: Communication Front Conference, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), 2001.
• Invited Lecture: New Era, New Art, New Technologies Presentation, Tinos, (Greece), 2001.
• Speaker: ISEA (Inter-Society for Electronic Arts) conference, Paris (France), 2001.
• Invited Lecture: Contemporary Video Art Presentation, ICA, Bucharest (Romania), 2001.
• Invited Lecture: Art and New Technologies Presentation, University of Cyprus, Nicosia (Cyprus), 2000.
• Invited Lecture: ComputerSpace Conference 1999, Sofia (Bulgaria), 1999.
• Invited Lecture: Thessaloniki Video Art Festival, Millos, Thessaloniki (Greece), 1998.