Josephine Machon

Key details:

Department:
Research
Role:
Research Active Staff
Headshot of a white woman with short curly blonde hair

Josephine is a practitioner-researcher working in the field of experiential performance and a leading scholar in immersive practice. Her practice-led research at Guildhall explores the tools and techniques of inclusive access in sensory theatres, examining the problems and potentials of technologies (XR and binaural sound, in particular) within this. This focus underpins her collaboration with Toby Young on his UKRI funded Future Leaders Fellowship project, Immersive Opera (2024-2028). Wider current research interests include investigating the role and influence of the audience-participant in interactive and instruction-led experiences, which involves an ongoing partnership with the internationally renowned ZU-UK.

Concerned more broadly with the socially engaged ways in which immersive practice can communicate and reimagine live(d) experience, she worked in partnership with the environmental charity, Global Action Plan (GAP) to launch its 'Luxury For All' campaign at 26 Leake Street, Waterloo Vaults, in October 2023. In collaboration with 'immersive world-builder', Meg Cunningham and students of Middlesex University’s Theatre programmes, it involved interactive storytelling and performance-installation, with audiences invited to explore what ‘luxury for all’ would look, sound and feel like, kickstarting a conversation about equitable public luxury as standard and as a solution to the climate and social inequalities crises.

Josephine has published widely on immersive, interactive and ‘(syn)aesthetic’ performance. The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia - 1st Edition (Routledge, 2019) reached Amazon’s #1 ‘Bestseller’, #1 ‘Most Wanted’ and #1 ‘Most Gifted’ in the Theatre & Performance charts on release and was longlisted for The Society for Theatre Research Theatre Book Prize in 2020, (with an honourable mention by, panel judge, Donald Hutera). She is currently working on the second edition for Punchdrunk alongside the first edition of The Punchdrunk Enrichment Encyclopaedia (forthcoming 2025). Her monograph, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Bloomsbury, 2013) won ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ in the CHOICE Awards, 2014, was shortlisted for The David Bradby TaPRA Award: 2015 and longlisted for The Society for Theatre Research Theatre Book Prize, 2014.

Josephine is Joint Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Series, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, which includes her co-edited collections alongside commissioned titles. She is on the Editorial Board for The International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media (IJPADM) and Body, Space & Technology (BST), a journal of the Online Library of Humanities Library (OLH).