Dr Misha Myers

Dr. Misha Myers is a Senior Lecture and Course Director of Creative Arts at Deakin University. Her work is all about creating and researching mobile and digital storytelling experiences that are interactive, place aware, location-based. She is exploring not only the use of digital technologies as tools, devices and environments for performance and storytelling, but how digital storytelling can be leveraged for community engagement and social innovation. Her work takes place across multiple platforms through live performances, games, installations, audio walks, radio broadcasts, or online artworks. It is often collaborative in process drawing together culturally diverse participants and teams with different disciplinary expertise to work towards bridging communities and solving challenging social problems through arts-based and digital methods.

Dr. Myers has been the recipient of several research grants and fellowships and led international research teams involving industry and academic partners as Principal Investigator. She was a recipient of a Monash Community Grant (2017) with Barking Spider Visual Theatre Company for ‘Theatre as Memory Work’ to explore inter-generational theatre based on stories of residents in aged-care. She was a UK Arts Humanities Research Council UnBox Fellow in India (2013) and received a follow on grant for the project ‘Play to Grow: Augmenting Agriculture with Social Impact Games’ involving collaboration with the Delhi-based rural development NGO Digital Green to co-design the game Bumper Crop with small-holding farmers in India. She was the recipient of two European Social Fund II grants for the research projects ‘Augmenting Impact with Social Media’ involving a collaboration with the UK-based theatre company Wildworks exploring transmedial storytelling through social media and ‘Designing Landscape Narrative Experience with Locative Media’ involving industry partnership with Treasure Trails. She created the award-winning interactive multimedia storytelling platform and series of BBC radio Devon broadcasts way from home (2004) with UK inhabitants of refugee and asylum seeker background to map their remembered landscapes of home. The platform was published and commissioned by Performance Research Journal and attracted an AOL Innovations in the Community Award. She was the recipient of a Japan Foundation Fellowship to train with the Japanese theatre director Suzuki Tadashi in his method of acting in Toga, Japan (2000). She has trained professionally in acting, directing and composition for theatre since 1995 with Anne Bogart and the Saratoga International Theatre Institute from New York, USA.

Dr. Myers' research is practice-based and all about creating and researching mobile and digital storytelling experiences that are interactive, place aware, location-based. She is exploring not only the use of digital technologies as tools, devices and environments for performance and storytelling, but how digital storytelling can be leveraged for community engagement and social innovation.  Her work takes place across multiple platforms through live performances, games, installations, audio walks, radio broadcasts, or online artworks. It is often collaborative in process drawing together culturally diverse participants and teams with different disciplinary expertise to work towards bridging communities and solving challenging social problems through arts-based enquiry enabled by digital technologies.

Dr. Myers has trained professionally in Suzuki Acting Method and Viewpoints Improvisation, and directing and composition for theatre since 1995 with Anne Bogart and the Saratoga International Theatre Institute from New York, USA, and in Suzuki Acting Method with Suzuki Tadashi in Toga, Japan in 2000. She teaches devising, improvisation and acting for theatre and performance based on her years of training with these directors and their companies. An experienced postgraduate research supervisor and examiner, Dr. Myers has expertise to supervise practice-based research across contemporary art forms and disciplines that are place-based, involve interaction with and participation of audiences and communities, and/or use creative technologies including networked, online, virtual/augmented reality, immersive, mobile and located tools, devices and environments. She is particularly interested in supervising projects exploring issues, challenges and skills of performing and/or creating experiences that involve a mix of live and recorded action, move between virtual and physical worlds and involve interaction between performers and audiences and performers and technology.

Dr. Misha Myers' work is all about creating and researching mobile and digital storytelling experiences that are interactive, place aware, location-based. She is exploring not only the use of digital technologies as tools, devices and environments for performance and storytelling, but how digital storytelling can be leveraged for community engagement and social innovation.  Her work takes place across multiple platforms through live performances, games, installations, audio walks, radio broadcasts, or online artworks. It is often collaborative in process drawing together culturally diverse participants and teams with different disciplinary expertise to work towards bridging communities and solving challenging social problems through arts-based enquiry enabled by digital technologies.

An experienced postgraduate research supervisor and examiner, Dr. Myers has expertise to supervise practice-based research across contemporary art forms and disciplines that are place-based, involve interaction with and participation of audiences and communities, and/or use creative technologies including networked, online, virtual/augmented reality, immersive, mobile and located tools, devices and environments. She is particularly interested in supervising projects exploring issues, challenges and skills of performing and/or creating experiences that involve a mix of live and recorded action, move between virtual and physical worlds and involve interaction between performers and audiences and performers and technology.

Dr. Misha Myers' work is all about creating and researching mobile and digital storytelling experiences that are interactive, place aware, location-based. She is exploring not only the use of digital technologies as tools, devices and environments for performance and storytelling, but how digital storytelling can be leveraged for community engagement and social innovation. Her work takes place across multiple platforms through live performances, games, installations, audio walks, radio broadcasts, or online artworks. It is often collaborative in process drawing together culturally diverse participants and teams with different disciplinary expertise to work towards bridging communities and solving challenging social problems through arts-based enquiry enabled by digital technologies.

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Selected Keynotes and Invited Presentations
2017 ‘Future of Storytelling’, Digital Writers Festival, Australia Centre for the Moving Image, Invited Panelist
2017 ‘Moving Out of Door: Moving practices in the artistic labour of women’ symposium, Deakin University, Keynote
2015  AHRC – British Council UnBox Showcase, Institute Contemporary Arts, London, Invited Speaker
2015  Creative Industries Research Institute, University of South Wales, Keynote Speaker
2015  Edinburgh Centre for the History of the Book Seminar Series, University of Edinburgh, Keynote speaker
2014  Impossible Constellation: Practice-Led Research Special Event, University of Lincoln, Invited speaker
2014  Beyond the Book Symposium, Devon Guild of Craftsmen, University of Exeter, Invited speaker
2013 Effectiveness of ICT for Rural Development, Digital Green, Delhi
2013  Research Councils UK Celebrating Collaborations Plenary, British Council High Commission, New
Delhi, Invited poster presentation
2013  Expanded Narrative Symposium, University of Plymouth, Invited speaker
2013  Mobility Futures, Lancaster University, Catalyst Bursary exhibition, workshop and presentation
2013  Community Engagement and the Arts: Performing Landscapes and Identities, University of East London,
Invited speaker
2013  UnBox Festival, New Delhi, Invited speaker
2012  Sideways Festival ‘Setting Out’ symposium, Belgium, Invited keynote speaker
2012  ‘Walking Sans Frontieres’ Panel, Slow Marathon, Deveron Arts, Huntly, Invited speaker
2011  Walking and Landskip Knowledge (W.A.L.K) symposium, Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh/University
of Sunderland, Invited plenary speaker
2010  Fine Art Visiting Lecturer series, Oxford Brookes University, Invited speaker
2009  Mobility and Nomadicity Symposium, University of Limerick, invited speaker
2008  ROAM: Walking Arts Festival Seminar, Loughborough, University, Invited speaker and festival respondent
2006  Creative Community Development, DCC Granollers, Spain, Invited speaker 
2004  Art in the Age of Terrorism, Millais Gallery, Invited speaker in series of talks from exhibition    

Conferences and Symposia Organised

2017 ‘Theatre as Memory Work’, Centre for Theatre and Performance, Monash University
2015  ‘Where to?; Steps Towards the Future of Walking Arts Practices’ with the AHRC Walking Artist Network, Falmouth University; Role: Lead Investigator/Organiser
2015  ‘I, Audience’, Falmouth University; Role: Lead Investigator/Organiser
2014 Workshop/Symposium, GeoHack, Fascinate 2014, Falmouth University. Role: Lead Investigator/Organiser
2013  Sandpit/Symposium, Rock Jam & being IN [landscape] seminar 2: A shared exploration of a Cornish Quarry, in partnership with Andrew Whall and Cornwall Autonomous Zone, Falmouth University; Role: Lead Investigator/Organiser
2013  ‘Storying Futurescapes’; Role: Lead Investigator/Organiser
2012  Sandpit, Locative Media and Landscape Stewardship; Role: Lead Investigator/Organiser
2012  Symposium and Festival of Performances, Now Everybody Sing; Role: Lead Investigator/Organiser
2011-2015 Raising Glasney Lecture Series, Falmouth University; Role: Lead Investigator/Organiser
1999  Performance Studies International 9: Here Be Dragons Performance Festival, Centre for Performance Research, University of Wales, Aberystwyth; Role: Assistant Producer
1998  Points of Contacts: Performances, Places, Pasts, Centre for Performance Research, University of Wales, Aberystwyth; Role: Assistant Producer

Myers is on the Editorial Board of Research in Drama Education: Journal of Applied Theatre & Performance, peer-reviews for a number of international journals across the arts, humanities and media, regularly reviews grant applications for the UK Research Council as a member of the AHRC Peer Review College since 2012, and is a member of Victorian Department of Premier’s Research Institute on Social Cohesion.

Speaking on digital storytelling as a panel member for the ‘The Future of Storytelling’ ACMI Conversations event at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (24 October 2017).: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMbRJYPVAj4

 

Guest on Afternoons with Richelle Hunt, ABC Radio Melbourne, 23 October 2017

Myers' collaboration with Deirdre Heddon has been featured in a number of media appearances including in the vodcast ‘The Walking Library: an interview by My Bookcase’, https://vimeo.com/119846573; in the BBC R4 series The Art of Now: Women Who Walk, 8 Oct 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000nmn; in BBC Radio Scotland’s The Janice Forsyth Show, 17 February 2015: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rlrlq/broadcasts/2015/02; and Resonance FM’s Er Outdoors: Women in the Open - Stories of Walking, 11 July 2016: https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/clear-spot-11th-july-2016-er-outdoors-2/.
 

Creative Applications Network

AOL Innovation in the Community Award

Dr. Myers’ recent projects include The Walking Library, an internationally recognised ongoing art-based research project created in collaboration with Dee Heddon (University of Glasgow) first commissioned in 2012 by the Sideways Festival of peripatetic art in Belgium, and by Glasgow 2018 European Championship Festival to collaborate with poet and visual artist Alec Finlay for Wild City.  Produced by Monash Academy of Performing Arts and the Centre for Theatre and Performance, Monash University, in partnership with Melbourne’s Greek Community Centre, Myers developed the transmedia performance game for smartphone Nobody's Ocean in 2016. The work invited audiences to reimagine Homer’s great epic poem ‘The Odyssey’ as a game played in the streets of Melbourne.