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Bio Sophia New

Portrait of Sophia. Photo.

Sophia New was the Course Leader for MA Performance: Theatre Making and MA Performance: Politics and Social Justice at Wimbledon College of the Arts, UAL from 2022 to end of 2023. Between 2020-2022 she shared a Guest Professorship with Daniel Belasco Rogers, with who she co-founded the performance company plan b, they taught and curated on the Interdisciplinary Art a Practice and Theory as part of the Studium Generale at University of the Arts Berlin. She co-taught workshops in Live Art and Performance to the Physical Theatre, Acting and Directing students at Folkwang University, Essen/Bochum for 12 years. She was a staff member at the Inter University of the Arts (HZT/UdK) in Berlin for 10 years mainly working on MA SODA (Solo Dance Authorship). Here she also developed the Makers Open as a format for all students to show and feedback on work at any stage. Her pedagogical interest is in supporting students in finding ways to express within the work and through supporting statements and documents a synergy between making and reflecting on one's own practice.

In New's solo performance and video works she is specifically interested in issues of the everyday, distance, intimacy and scale within art making. Her works have been shown in Expo festival, Nottingham, National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, Chapter Arts Cardiff, Podewil, Uferstudios, Dock 11 in Berlin and Dortmund Künstlerhaus.

She is also a performer, video maker and co-founder of plan b with Daniel Belasco Rogers. Since 2002 they have made over 25 projects for different cities, festivals, and galleries. Through plan b New and Belasco Rogers have made a wide variety of works in the fields of fine art, performance, new media and sited works. They consider their work to be both site and relationship specific. Through their long-term practice of gathering personal data (GPS and SMS) they have an ongoing body of work which takes many material forms both analogue and digital and has caused them to become more politicised about how daily data is being used.

She studied philosophy and literature with German at Sussex University, received her Masters in Feminist Performance from Bristol University and  completed PhD from Exeter University in 2022. She has taught on performance courses at Gloucester University, Aberystwyth University and Das Arts in Amsterdam. She has run courses on urban interventions with Daniel Belasco Rogers at the Hafen City University Hamburg, Leipzig University and Art School, Bard and University of the Arts in Berlin.

As well as numerous publications in the Performance Research Journal and catalogues from group exhibitions she contributed to The Imaginary Reader published by Volt and Forms of Life: An Ecology of Artistic Practices, by Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers + Questions théoriques.

She wrote a chapter for ‘Practicing Composition: Making Practice. Texts, Dialogues and Documents 2011-2013’ based on a 4-year Erasmus Exchange of MA programmes and published by University of the Arts Theatre Academy in 2015.

In 2016-2018 she was part of a research programme funded by the Volkswagenstiftung on the correlation between the Arts, Sciences and Movement. This culminated in the publication ‘Expanding Writing: Inscriptions of Movement between Art and Science’ by Revolver Publishing, in 2019.

Links

planbperformance.net