Gabriella Giannachi - Biography#

Gabriella Giannachi, FRSA, is Professor in Performance and New Media, and Director of the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter, which promotes advanced interdisciplinary research in performance and the arts through collaborations between artists, academics and scientists from a range of disciplines.

Her most recent publications include: Virtual Theatres: an Introduction (Routledge: 2004); Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, ed. with Nigel Stewart (Peter Lang: 2005); The Politics of New Media Theatre (Routledge: 2007); Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated, co-authored with Nick Kaye (MUP 2011), nominated in Theatre Library Association 44th Annual Book Awards (2012); Performing Mixed Reality, co-authored with Steve Benford (MIT Press 2011) and Archaeologies of Presence, co-edited with Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks (Routledge 2012). She has published articles in Contemporary Theatre Review; Leonardo; Performance Research; Digital Creativity and PAJ, and co-co-authored conference papers for ISEA 2010; IVA 2009, 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents; CHI 2008; CHI 2009 (best paper award), CHI 2012 (best paper award) and CHI 2013 (best paper award). She is currently researching a monograph about digital archives for MIT.

I research performance and new media documentation, a burgeoning field that concerns itself with the capture of rich quality data about an event (whether artistic or other) so it may be preserved for future generations. More precisely, I am an expert at documenting mixed reality events that span physical and digital environments. This has led me to research how documentations and, more generally, the archives that host them, can be used outside the museums as mobile centres for interpretation and knowledge production to facilitate creative engagement with art, heritage, popular and material culture. In particular, I research how mobile interpretation and creative engagement with such archives can generate new knowledge that is of value to users and museums; how encountering archival materials outside museums can bring return visitors as well as new visitors to museums; how the self-documentation of one’s encounter with art can constitute a rewarding free-style mobile learning experience; how it can stimulate memory production and augment individual and communities’ sense of presence and identity; and what copyright and accessibility implications these uses of documentations may entail.

Over the last five years, she has been researching projects in partnerships with: Tate, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter City FC Supporters Trust, Imperial War Museum, British Library, Stanford Libraries, San Francisco Art Institute, Ludwig Boltzman Institute Media.Art.Research and Met Office Hadley Centre.

Gabriella Giannachi has a BA in Modern Languages and Literatures, in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy from Turin University, and a PhD in English from Cambridge University, where she was awarded a scholarship by her College, Trinity Hall, to research the role of silence in modern European Drama.