Academic Bios
Helen Paris
Helen Paris is Artistic Director of Curious and specialises in embodied performance, autobiography and interdisciplinary research through her collaborations with the biological and ecological sciences. Her work also explores issues of social and environmental justice, audience/performer relationships and proximity and intimacy.
From 2011–2018 she served as a Professor of Performance Making in Stanford University’s Department of Theatre & Performance Studies. Previous to that, she wrote and was director of the MA in Contemporary Performance Making at Brunel University, London. Paris is recognized as an artist-scholar with world-leading practice as research (PaR) outputs and pedagogy, integrating artistic research and scholarship, as demonstrated in her books Performing Proximity (Palgrave, 2014) and Devising Theatre and Performance: Curious Methods (The University of Chicago Press and Intellect, 2021).
Paris has been Visiting Professor/Artist in Residence in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. Recently Paris has been Invited Professor at the Université Grenoble Alpes and Visiting Professor at Brasenose, Oxford. With Curious, Paris has performed at venues and festivals including the Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre, Taipei, Taiwan, London’s Cultural Olympiad, and the Sydney Opera House. Dr Paris received her doctorate from the University of Surrey in 2000, exploring notions of the virtual and the visceral in live performance.
In 2024 Helen was honoured by being awarded a GATES Distinguished Fellows at the Maison de la Creation et l’Innovation, Grenoble University as part of the International Excellence in the Humanities Programme.
Helen was the Bogliasco Fellow for Theatre in Fall 2024.
Alongside her work in performance Helen Paris is also a fiction writer. Novels include Lost Property (2022) and The Invisible Women’s Club, (2023) both published by Penguin. She is represented by Greene & Heaton agency, Somerset House, London.
Helen is delighted to be Professor of Writing as part of Creative Body Institute.
Leslie Hill
Formerly co director of Curious, Leslie Hill is now Chair of Theatre & Dance at Muhlenberg University. She is interested in the intersections of theatre and Live Art with politics, activism and social justice movements. Her monograph Sex, Suffrage and the Stage: First Wave Feminism in British Theatre was published by Palgrave for the UK suffrage centenary in 2018.
Previously, Hill was Associate Professor and Artistic Director of Stanford’s Department of Theatre & Performance Studies (2011–2017); she also served as convenor of the interdisciplinary arts Practice-Based PhD programme at the University of East London (2006–2010).
Originally from New Mexico, Hill holds a double BA in English and Philosophy from the University of New Mexico, an MA in Text & Performance from the University of Birmingham (UK) and a PhD in Theatre from the University of Glasgow. Hill was awarded a NESTA (National Endowment for Science Education and the Arts) fellowship in 2003 and has been Visiting Professor at institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Brasenose College, Oxford.
