Joanna Bucknall

I am a social entrepreneur and an immersive experience and transformation architect who works across the creative cultural industries and academia. As a founder of the Immersive Experience Network (IEN) I have been instrumental in establishing Live/location-based immersive as a discreet cultural sector. Through arts and humanities data-driven approaches IEN is working to build a credible and robust creative collaborative community through events, industry research, knowledge exchange, networking, capacity and resource building.

Joanna Bucknall is a performance maker and scholar. She is a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the department for Drama & Theatre Arts. Joanna is the producer/host of the podcast series, Talking about Immersive Theatre, (TAIT) and the artistic director of Vertical Exchange Performance Collective (VEX). Joanna is co-founder of the Immersive Experience Network (IEN). Joanna has been the Principal Investigator for AHRC and ESRC funded projects and recently published Talking about Immersive Theatre: conversations on immersions and interactivities in performance with Bloomsbury. Joanna makes, supports, and writes about work that includes its audiences in fundamental ways.

My current and future research interests and reputation lie in dramaturgies of audience activation, inclusion, and participation (especially immersive theatre), gamification of experience, live/location-based experience design, and practice as research methodologies (especially embodied approaches to the documentation of performance and audience experience). I have published widely in traditional but also innovative formats on immersive theatre and Practice as research methodologies. I have developed:

• the concept of ‘elusivity’ (2023) as a way of conceptualising the role of secrecy and exclusivity in immersive and interactive theatre practices.
• on dramaturgies of dialogicality as a practical approach to engaging audiences in ethical, care driven ways. This is part of the emerging field of care aesthetics in art, (2018).
• A hybrid, interdisciplinary, immersive methodology for capturing and monitoring shifts in audience perceptions. This research was undertaken as an Arts and Humanities Research Council/Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council research project called Corpus Quod, (2018).
• two original practice-as-research methodologies: ‘the Daisy Chain Model’, (2017), and ‘the reflective participant’, (2017).

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My current and future research interests in audience-centric performance are divided into three strands, each of which is associated with grant capture, international, cross-sector, interdisciplinary collaboration, and high-quality publications. Over the next five years, I intend to consolidate my growing reputation in the fields of immersive theatre, audience-centric dramaturgies, the gamification of performance, practice-as-research methodologies, and embodied approaches to performance documentation. I will continue to work with external partners on funding bids, to expand my networks with non-academic organisations and to work in interdisciplinary ways.