I am an award-winning, socially engaged transdisciplinary artist, movement researcher, writer and educator living and working in Nottingham, UK. My transdisciplinary practice is influenced by training in fine art, performance and somatics, particularly with key figures such as Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson, Anna Furse, Patricia Bardi, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, Mårten Spångberg, Seke Chimutengwende and Martin Hargreaves. I recently completed a PhD in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London (2025), where my research critically examined the politics and economics of touch choreography in somatic and everyday life, focusing on issues of consent, exclusion, and progressive feminist epistemologies. My doctoral project proposed a new framework for understanding the choreography of touch through a socio-political and intersectional lens, contributing to contemporary debates in performance studies and embodied research.

 

My work is primarily collaborative and dialogic. It spans live performance, performance writing, video/performance to camera, voicework, site-specific performance, installation, sculpture, drawing and more recently script writing. All are, for me, interconnected media and aesthetic experiments through which I explore the precarity and vulnerability emanating from touch, that is, the relational field, attempting to give form and intelligibility to sensorially-grounded phenomena that are slippery and elusive, and escape representation. I am interested in the relationship between the body, the senses, their memory, and knowledge, as well as in the ways bodily sensations, that is to say our most intimate and microscopic dimension, are connected to political and economic realities, both societal and global. My intention, as an artist-researcher, is to create a space of visibility for an experience that is otherwise invisible, non-quantifiable, and difficult to express.

 

Over the past ten years, a core strand of my practice has focused on working with marginalised identities through workshops and mentoring. I design accessible practice-as-research frameworks that support participants to explore and articulate lived experience through embodied and creative processes. This includes projects such as Psychotic Ballet, challenging stigma around mental health, and ReWriting the Breastfeeding Body, centring women and non-binary experiences, as well as mentoring artists facing structural barriers.

​

I have presented work internationally, including at Nottingham Contemporary, Lakeside Arts Centre, Attenborough Arts Centre, Little Wolf Parade Festival, Departure Lounge Festival, Body IQ Festival (DE) and Rurality Video Salon (PL/TUR). I exhibited somatic drawings at Leicester Gallery (DMU) as part of an exhibition exploring the legacy of the Fluxus movement (2026). I received a practice-as-research commission from Nottingham Contemporary for The Complaining Body (2018), part of the Manual Labours project (SWE/UK). Earlier work includes Amy (Cedric Ford Art Award, 2015) and Margaret (shortlisted, 2014).

​

I have collaborated with partners including award-winning novelist Eve Makis, theatre-maker Olwen Davies, choreographer Joe Moran, Dance4/Fabric, New Walk Museum Leicester and Bonington Art Gallery. I am also a published author in cultural magazines including LefLion and 4WORDS (Dance4/Fabric), and in peer-reviewed publications such as Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, and Body, Space & Technology and have presented my work at major international conferences and festivals, including TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association, UK) and Body IQ (Germany).

 

In addition to my research and teaching, I have held roles as a research assistant, forum convenor, and mentor, and have actively contributed to anti-racist and feminist initiatives in performance and dance.

​

Contact: maudlannen@gmail.com

​

​