Anna Furse, Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths, University of London, is an award-winning theatre director and writer. Trained at the Royal Ballet in the 1960s, and at Bristol, Paris and London Universities, after an award-winning 20-year career as theatre director and writer, she balanced an academic and creative career for the next 20 years, directing the pioneering international MA in PERFORMANCE MAKING at Goldsmiths, leaving in April 2022 to resume her freelance work. Her Anglo-Greek duet A CRACK: 23 SPOKEN SONGS FOR THE ZEITGEIST toured Greece in September 2023, and her audio-visual installation MUSCLE: A QUESTION OF POWER ran at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork from April to August 2023. She is a published author of books, articles and plays, frequent speaker at conferences and events, co-director of the Performance Research Lab PeARL (with Liudmila Aliabieva, HSE, Moscow) and Visiting Fellow: The American College of Greece and the Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts, Athens. Anna is currently writing a book for Routledge on her Goldsmiths MA pedagogy, co-authoring a book on Vivienne Westwood, and writing a book developing from MUSCLE. In 2024, will direct her empathy work OTHER PEOPLE’S SHOES (originally commissioned by the Michael Cacoyiannis Foundation, Athens in 2016) - created from nothing but old shoes as found objects - in Palermo and Nisville Jazz Festival, Serbia.

Specialism: Creative Labs, Creative Writing for Performance and Medicine, Dramaturgy, Movement Work, Performance Making, Practitioner Lab, Theatre

Photo credit: Sheila Burnett