Dr Alex Mermikides
Dr Alex Mermikides directs the unique doctoral programmes at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, which has a distinctive focus on research in, through and for the performing arts.
Her own research also bridges scholarship and practice, the latter as a director, dramaturg and playwright. She has published on contemporary theatre-making (particularly devised and interdisciplinary performance) and the interface between theatre and medicine in the UK. Her edited books include Devising in Process (Palgrave 2010) and Performance and the Medical Body (Methuen Bloomsbury 2016) and she is currently working on a monograph on theatre, medicine and concepts of the human.
She runs Chimera, an arts/research network founded in 2012 with an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Through this, she creates performances on medical themes, often working in collaboration with medical specialists and patients. Recent projects include Bloodlines, about patient experience of stem cell transplant, produced at the Science Museum London, Antwerp University Hospital, Manchester Science Festival and elsewhere. Her current project Careful, developed with support from the Arts Council, explores themes of compassion, care and empathy through the perspective of nurses. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Times Higher Educational Supplement and on This Week (BBC Radio 4).
Recent Research Outputs
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Smart, Jackie, and Alex Mermikides. "Doing What Comes Naturally? Women and Devising in the UK Today." In Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance, edited by Proudfit, S & Syssoyeva, K, 253-268 New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
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Mermikides, Alex. "The Appliance of Science: Devising, Dramaturgy and the Alternative Science Play." In New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, edited by Trencsenyi, K & B. Cochrane, 125-144 London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014.
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Mermikides, Alex, and Gianna Bouchard, ed. Performance and the Medical Body. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
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Weitkamp, E, and Alex Mermikides. "Medical performance and the 'inaccessible' experience of illness: an exploratory study." British Medical Journal of Medical Humanities 43, 3 (2016), 186-193.
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Mermikides, Alex. Bloodlines. Chimera Network, 2013.