Dr Alex Mermikides' research bridges scholarship and practice, the latter as a director, dramaturg and playwright. She has published on contemporary theatre-making (particularly devised and interdisciplinary performance) and the interface between theatre and medicine in the UK. Her edited books include Devising in Process (Palgrave 2010) and Performance and the Medical Body (Methuen Bloomsbury 2016) and she is currently working on a monograph on theatre, medicine and concepts of the human. She runs Chimera, an arts/research network founded in 2012 with an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Through this, she creates performances on medical themes, often working in collaboration with medical specialists and patients. Recent projects include Bloodlines, about patient experience of stem cell transplant, produced at the Science Museum London, Antwerp University Hospital, Manchester Science Festival and elsewhere. Her current project Careful, developed with support from the Arts Council, explores themes of compassion, care and empathy through the perspective of nurses. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Times Higher Educational Supplement and on This Week (BBC Radio 4).
Alex took up the D'Oyly Carte Senior Lectureship in Arts and Health at Kings College London in 2022. She remains a member of the Institute for Social Impact Research in the Performing Arts.
Mermikides, Alex, Sally Richardson, Terry Firth, Paul Newcombe, and Karen Norman. "Treading carefully." British Journal of Nursing 27, 3 (2018), 728-728.
Mermikides, Alex. "'I and you' Becomes 'I am you': The Audience’s Gaze in Contemporary Medical Performance." Critical Stages 17, (2018).
Smart, Jackie, and Alex Mermikides. "Doing What Comes Naturally? Women and Devising in the UK Today." In Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance, edited by Proudfit, S & Syssoyeva, K, 253-268 New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Mermikides, Alex, and Gianna Bouchard, ed. Performance and the Medical Body. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Weitkamp, E, and Alex Mermikides. "Medical performance and the 'inaccessible' experience of illness: an exploratory study." British Medical Journal of Medical Humanities 43, 3 (2016), 186-193.
Mermikides, Alex. Careful. Chimera Network, 2016.
Mermikides, Alex. "The Appliance of Science: Devising, Dramaturgy and the Alternative Science Play." In New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, edited by Trencsenyi, K & B. Cochrane, 125-144 London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014.
Mermikides, Alex. Taking Direction: New Dramaturgies of Science from the Splice Symposium and the Performing Science Conference. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 39, no. 3, 2014.
Mermikides, Alex. "Brilliant Theatre-Making at the National: Devising, Collective Creation and the Director’s Brand." Studies in Theatre and Performance 33, 2 (2013), 153-167.
Mermikides, Alex. "Collective Creation and the Creative Industries." In Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, edited by K. Syssoyeva & S. Proudfit, 51-70 Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.