Dr Deborah Pearson

Biography

Deborah Pearson's work spans playwrighting, directing, live art and visual art. She is founder and a co-director of UK-based curation collective Forest Fringe and the winner of several distinctions both for her practice and for Forest Fringe, including twice being named on the Stage 100 List. Her performances have been staged in over twenty countries across five continents and translated into six languages. Her latest collaboration The Talent (2023) with Bristol-based company Action Hero toured throughout the UK and is one of eight shows selected for the Horizons Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival this August. Past notable projects include Inside Bitch (2019) at the Royal Court, The Filibuster (2019) at Conde Duque in Madrid and Somerset House in London, and the live documentary History History History which toured between 2016 and 2019 throughout the UK, Europe, Australia, China and Canada, including a performance at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Her performance concept The Future Show, in which a performer writes the story of the rest of their lives based on a score she wrote and reads it out loud in front of an audience, is published by Oberon Books. Artist-performers have undertaken the task in festival contexts in Singapore, Hong Kong, Portugal, Germany, the UK and Canada. It has also been used as a teaching concept at several UK universities, and was turned into an audio piece during the pandemic by Situations Festival as part of the Coventry City of Culture scheme.

She holds a PhD on narrative preoccupations in contemporary performance from Royal Holloway where she was a Reid Scholar, and was among the first cohort of resident artists at Somerset House. She is an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck and Senior Lecturer of Dramaturgy at UAL’s Screen School. Her debut feature Dream Agency, co-directed with Andy Field and collaboratively written with other artists from Forest Fringe, premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2022. It won best Micro-budget Feature at the London Independent Film Festival in 2023.