Prior to becoming a university lecturer I worked as a stage manager, technician and lighting designer, with several theatre companies, including Black Mime Theatre, Black Theatre Co-operative (now NITRO) and the Tricycle Theatre. I draw on my experience of working in the theatre industry to research the politics and practices of contemporary black British theatre in its socio-political and cultural contexts.

I have published a number of articles on black British women’s playwriting, and my monograph Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007) explored British black women’s plays, poetry, and performance in relation to questions about feminist theatre practice. I am currently researching black playwriting in the first decade of the twenty first century, focusing primarily on the mainstream presence of Kwame Kwei Armah, debbie tucker green, Bola Agbaje, and Roy Williams OBE. I am particularly interested in how their visibility has been enabled by initiatives in Arts Council funding policies to enhance cultural diversity, and how the plays articulate a politics of black experience and contemporary national identities.

Two further strands to my research include an interest in the staging of black women’s cultural memory in plays and performance that takes cultural/historical events or figures as source material and I am also exploring representations of race on the British stage since the renaissance, which includes looking at integrated casting and researching contemporary British black and Asian productions of Shakespeare and other canonical playwrights.

Courses 2010-11: British Theatre since 1979: Black and Asian; Performance Research Project: debbie tucker green; Critical Theories

Other courses include: Staging Race: Renaissance Plays to Contemporary Performance; Shakespeare: Page to Stage; Film, Gender, Race and Sexuality; Producing Women: Feminist Theory and Theatre; MA British Drama since 1939; Contemporary Theatremaking: Black Mime Theatre; Contemporary Theatremaking: Tara Arts