Emily Orley

Biography

Areas of expertise 

Scenography, installation and live art, creative-critical writing, site-writing, practice-as-research, heritage and place.

Profile 

Emily Orley is a London-based artist, researcher and educator, whose work includes performance, scenography, installation, video and hybrid modes of writing. She is interested in exploring ideas to do with memory, maintenance and enchantment, as well as the un-fixing of time, heritage and place. Always open to new forms of experimentation, she is endlessly inspired by lively discussions, new encounters, and unlikely assemblages. She is a firm believer in breaking down the false binaries that separate practice and theory, making and thinking and writing about making.  

As well as working on the MA at Guildhall School, Orley supervises a number of PhD students, runs postgraduate workshops on practice-as-research and creative-critical writing and is a member of the steering committee for Guildhall’s undisciplined, the School’s cross-artform collaboration programme for students. She also teaches performance writing on the European Cultural Centre Performance Art Platform.

Qualifications 

PhD, PGCHE 

Previous experience 

Orley taught at Roehampton University for 17 years, where she was a Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance before coming to Guildhall in January 2022. She has degrees from the Wimbledon School of Art and Cambridge and Roehampton Universities and trained at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. 

Selected publications 

Orley, E (2022) ‘Editing: An experiment in speculative thinking’. Article/provocation in a special issue of Textual Cultures (15.1) edited by Mathelinda Nabugodi and Christopher Ohge 

Orley, E. (2021)‘The invisible boundaries of the moment: at a distance and through a different body’. Chapter in Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing edited by Florian Mussgnug, Mathelinda Nabugodi and Thea Petrou. London: Peter Lang 

Orley E. and Hilevaara K. (2020) Review of Mohamad Hafeda’s Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut (2019) with Katja Hilevaara for Jane Rendell’s online platform Site-Reading Writing Quarterly, Issue 2  

Orley E. (2019) ‘Searching Shadows, Lighting Bones: Commemorative Performance as an Open-Ended Negotiation’. Chapter in Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration, edited by Michael Pinchbeck and Andrew Westerside, London: Palgrave. 

Orley, E. and Hilevaara K. (Eds) (2018) The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice. London: Routledge 

Links

www.emilyorley.com