Julia Bardsley

Bardsley was a founder member of dereck dereck Productions; other stage performances in the 1980s included Marie-Christine in Ardèle, Where the Rainbow Ends, Gaudette at the Almeida Theatre (where she won the Time Out award for direction), and Too Clever by Half and A Flea in Her Ear (Antoinette Plucheux) at the Old Vic. She was also the assistant producer for A Night at the Chinese Opera with Kent Opera.^[3]

She began her career in theatre directing, writing and adapting works for the stage,^[4] and was joint artistic director of the Leicester Haymarket & Young Vic Theatres (1991-4).^[5] She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Middlesex University in 2007.^[6] Bardsley lectures at Queen Mary, University of London, and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.^[7] Her work has become known for its experimental use of character, solo performance, and elaborate video and set work in a performance art/visual art context.^[8]

Bardsley's work is significant in its disruption of traditional understandings of theatre;^[9] her hybrid practice first developed in collaboration with designer Aldona Cunningham in the 1990s through their innovative work on Hamlet at the Young Vic, which in turn led to a five-year long creation process combining theatre, performance and photography, resulting in the work 12/Stages/3 (a Memory Theatre) as part of the British Festival of Visual Theatre in 1999.^[10]

From the late 1990s onwards her film and video works have been selected for film festivals internationally,^[11] collected and represented in collections such as Lux Artists Films^[12] and the University of the Arts British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection.^[13] She has also created video art work for theatre productions including An Ocean of Rain, at the Almeida Theatre, London, 2008,^[14] and Suenos composed by Simon Holt,^[15] premiered at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in 2007 .^[16][17]