Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham is a director, actor, intimacy choreographer, scholar, and educator. In addition to directing over 50 productions, she was the Founding Producing Artistic Director of the professional nonprofit Circle Ensemble Theatre Company for 8 years. Her current scholarly research applies concepts from behavioral neuroscience to acting methodologies and theories to give performance scholars a richer and more precise understanding of the acting process, while allowing teachers and directors to zero in on the techniques that are most likely to help them achieve their goals- all in safer, braver spaces for the entire production team. Joelle is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Kansas State University and a proud member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. She serves as the Media Editor for the Stanislavski Studies Journal and its companion website Stanislavsky: Here, Today, Now, as an Advisory Board Member for the Routledge Theatre, Performance and Embodied Cognition Series, and on the editorial board of The Journal of Consent-Based Performance. Recent publications include Stanislavsky and Intimacy (editor and contributing author), “Embodying Active Analysis and Inner Monologue for the Screen” in Stanislavsky and Screen Actor Training, and "Active Analysis for Beginning Acting Students: A Class Blueprint," in Stanislavski Studies. 

Rhonda Blair’s work has been at the intersection of theatre practice and theory. She has numerous articles on applications of cognitive sciences to acting, directing, text, and reception; books include The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (Routledge 2008) and Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies (Methuen 2016, co-edited with Amy Cook). She has directed and performed in over 70 productions and has created original solo and devised performance work. She is particularly interested in how current research on the brain, body, thought, feeling, language, and cultural “ecologies” informs and empowers us when we make theatre. She was president of the American Society for Theatre Research 2009-2012, and received its 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award.

Amy Cook is a Professor of English/Theatre. She has published Shakespearean Futures: casting the bodies of tomorrow on Shakespeare’s stages today (Cambridge Elements 2020), Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (Michigan 2018), Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance Through Cognitive Science (Palgrave 2010), and co-edited Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies (Methuen 2016). Her most recent essay, "Shadow Play: Loss and Performativity" is forthcoming from TDR.

Dr. Thalia R. Goldstein is an Associate Professor and the Director of Applied Developmental Psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. Her research focuses on children's engagement in pretend play, theatre, drama, and other imaginative activities, and how such activities intersect with children’s developing social and emotional skills. She directs the Play, Learning, Arts, and Youth (PLAY) lab and is co-director of the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab, the Mason Arts Research Center (MasonARC). 

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Dr. Goldstein received a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in 2010 from Boston College. She completed post-doctoral training at Yale University from 2010-2012. Dr. Goldstein's research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The John Templeton Foundation, the Caplan Foundation, Arts Connection, and the Department of Homeland Security. Her papers have appeared in Child Development, Trends in Cognitive Science, Journal of Cognition and Development, and Developmental Science, among others. Dr. Goldstein serves on the editorial boards of the journals Empirical Studies in the Arts and Imagination Cognition and Personality, and she is the current co-editor of the APA Division 10 Journal, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. She was named fellow of the American Psychological Association in 2023. Her book Why Theatre Education Matters: Understanding is Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Benefits  (Teacher’s College Press) was published in July 2024.  

Brad Jackson is a doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia. His doctoral research focuses on the intersections of cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, and narrative film, specifically, the role of multimodal figuration in film analysis. Brad’s dissertation project “Cognitive Poetics of Cinema” explores the role of multimodality and figurative meaning in representations of character emotion and experience through the lens of cognition. He has presented his work on cognitive poetics in theatre and film at several international conferences, including Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities (2017, 2018, 2019) and the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (2021, 2022) and has published work in the film journal Projections (2022) and the Baltic Screen Media Review (2023).

Richard is an actor, director, author and Professor. He trained in Jacques Lecoq’s approach to theatre with Philippe Gaulier and Monika Pagneux, later completing the “Transversale” Stage Pedagogique at L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq. He is Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Faculty in the Arts at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA. A Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar on Neuroscience and Art, he has received the Institut Français award for theatre, the British Telecom Innovations Award and the Heinz Endowments Creative Heights Award (USA). Theatre credits in the UK include The Almeida, 1982 Co., Complicité, The Oxford Playhouse, Riverside Studios, Tricycle Theatre, Traverse Theatre, and co-founding London’s Commotion Theatre Company. In the USA, he has worked with Unseam’d Shakespeare, Pittsburgh Playhouse, Quantum Theatre, New York’s Perry Street Theatre, Squonk Opera, and further afield at Toronto’s Harbourfront Theatre, Warsaw’s Teatr Polski, Madrid’s Festival de Otono and Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris. Publications include Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Performance (Routledge 2012), The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq (Routledge, 2016) and The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science (Routledge 2019). In 2025 he launched the Routledge Theatre, Performance and Embodied Cognition Series.

Scott C. Knowles, PhD, (he/him) is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Arts Administration at Southern Utah University (SUU). His scholarship focuses on the intersections between cognitive science, emotion, and theatre, with specific emphasis in directing and dramaturgy. His directing work focuses primarily on theatre for social change, working to involve audience, company, and community in issues beyond the walls of the theatre through a variety of outreach approaches. He serves as the co-director for the Wooden O Symposium and Shakespeare Studies Minor at SUU and is a reader for both Words Cubed at the Utah Shakespeare Festival and the New Play Lab at Kayenta Center of the Arts. In 2017, Scott was honored with SUU’s Distinguished Faculty for Diversity and Inclusion Award based on his work with The Laramie Project. He has published in Etudes, A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage, and Theatre Topics.

Šárka Havlíčková Kysová is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Her teaching and research lie at the intersection of theatre theory, particularly cognitive approaches, and opera staging analysis, with a particular focus on both historical and contemporary productions of Baroque and 19th-century operas. She utilizes frameworks such as Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Image Schemas, Conceptual Blending Theory, and Multimodal Metaphor to analyze operatic production practice and directorial-scenographic concepts. In her recent research, she focuses on sharing emotions in operatic performances and audiences' physiological responses to the performance. Besides two monographs in Czech, she has published many articles in chapters mostly in English such as Singing in the blend: stagings of Verdi's operatic Shakespeare in the Czech Republic after 1989 (2021), "Audio-visual Metaphors in Operatic Shakespeare: Verdi's Macbeth and Otello in Czech Theatres" (2022), "Endangered Heart: Image Schemas as the Organising Principle of Direction-scenographic Concept for the Brno Production of Händel's Alcina" (2024), "The Czech Coronasong: A Multimodal Perspective" (2025, with W. Lu). She is the Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed international journal Theatralia. 

Allie Marotta (she/her) is an arts educator, scholar, and participatory theatre maker. Her scholarly work investigates the cognitive science of spectatorship, specifically looking at immersive and participatory theatre. Allie is a current doctoral student at The Graduate Center, CUNY Ph.D. Theatre and Performance program. She is the NYC Curator for No Proscenium and a founding creator of experiential theatre company You&I. She currently serves as the Arts in Education Manager of Teaching Artists and Curriculum Development at Brooklyn Arts Council. Allie was most recently published in  Pandemic Play: Community in Performance, Gaming, and the Arts (“Mixed Media Encounters: Finding the Future of Immersive Work Through the Pandemic,” Palgrave Macmillian, 2024). Allie has worked as teaching artist, teaching theatre, dance, and music for various organizations throughout NYC and New Jersey and she currently teaches at Hunter College. www.allie-marotta.com

Bruce McConachie has been writing about theatre, cognition, performance, and film from 2000 to the present. His early books include American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment (2004), Engaging Audiences: A cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (2008), and Theatre and Mind (2013). Since his retirement from the University of Pittsburgh, his work his focused on enactive cognition, human evolution, and cultural evolution. These latter books include Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (2015), The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance, and Cognitive Science (with Rick Kemp) (2019), and Drama, Politics, and Evolution (2021). He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Hollywood Climate Films: An Evolutionary History and Critique.  Bruce and his wife Stephanie are happily living in Silver Spring, Maryland

Dr. Carla Neuss is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Baylor University. She is currently working on a monograph that traces transnational circulations of medieval biblical drama. She earned her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at UCLA, having previously received her B.A. in English Literature at U.C. Berkeley and her MPhil in Medieval Studies at the University of Oxford. She was a postdoctoral fellow from 2021-2023 at Yale University in Religion and Literature. Her writing has been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Exemplaria, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. As a playwright and director, her award-winning work has been staged in the U.S., U.K. and Ecuador.

Dr Christina (Xristina) Penna is a performance practitioner and Senior Lecturer in Performance at the University of Derby. Her creative practice combines mixed media, handmade objects, and audience-generated material to produce collaborative performance installations she calls contraptions. These works embrace inefficient aesthetics, error, and unpredictability as catalysts for co-creation and interaction. Her practice-led PhD, Towards a CogScenography: Cognitive Science, Scenographic Reception and Processes (University of Leeds), explored how cognitive science (4E cognition and embodied PP) can inform scenographic making processes and audience engagement. Through this research, she developed the concept of the scenographic contraption—a design approach that uses hybridity and disruption to provoke collaborative thinking. Xristina’s recent practice-research investigates how a scenographer can design and use the uncertainty provoked in audiences when invited to participate or interact with design-led performance work. She has published visual essays and articles in journals such as Performance Research, Intellect, and Theatralia, and presented at international conferences including Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities, Worlding the Brain, IFTR, PSi, and TaPRA. She is currently co-convener of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) Scenography Working Group.

I’m Professor of Performance at the University of Kent with research interests in contemporary performance and cognitive neuroscience, applied and socially engaged theatre, autobiographical drama and performance ethnography. My publications include Gertrude Stein (Northcote House, 2007), Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice (Palgrave, 2012) and the edited collections Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being (Methuen, 2013) and Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity and Dramas of the Mind (co-edited with Philip Barnard, 2019). I’ve been Principal Investigator for four interdisciplinary projects, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, investigating autistic identities through creative practices (Imagining Autism, Autism Re-Imagined, Playing A/Part and Playing A/Part Online). I am currently Co-investigator for two further grants using arts based methods to research adolescent mental health: ATTUNE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and CREATE (transdisciplinary methods and adolescent loneliness). I am also Co-Investigator for an AHRC project developing training and educational resources as interventions for online gender violence ( Understanding online misogyny: Vulnerability, Violence and In(ter)vention). I am co-editor and co-founder of Methuen’s Performance and Science series and I am a consultant on neurodiversity, working with organisations such as such as The National Theatre and Audible.

Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre and Director of Research at Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey, and has previously held chairs the University of Kent and Roehampton University. He has published extensively on theatre and performance from the early modern period to the present, including seven monographs, seven edited volumes and numerous essays and book chapters, stretching from Representing Shakespeare: England. History and the RSC in 1994 to About Shakespeare: Bodies, Spaces and Texts in 2020. His current research sits at the intersection between Shakespeare studies, the cognitive humanities, dramaturgy and applied and socially engaged performance, as represented by the collection Shakespeare and Social Engagement (2023), co-edited with Rowan Mackenzie, and a series of essays on performance, inclusion and neurodiversity. He collaborates with Flute Theatre, a company making Shakespeare with and for neurodiverse performers and audiences and is working with Synergy Theatre Project on their playwriting programme for prisoners and ex-offenders. His Arden Performance Edition of The Winter’s Tale will be published in 2025, and he is completing the volume on The Comedy of Errors for the Manchester University Press Shakespeare in Performance series, in which he revisits a play whose comic currency

consists of sex work, slavery and the death penalty.

Evelyn Tribble  (Lyn) is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.  She specializes in Shakespeare and has published extensively on Distributed Cognition, cognitive ecologies, and skill. Key publications include "Distributing Cognition in the Globe," Shakespeare Quarterly 2006;  Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering (with Nicholas Keene, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body  (Bloomsbury, 2017).  She is collaborating with John Sutton on a short monograph on Cognitive Ecologies.