The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) today announce nine international Fellows who will lead a major programme exploring the future of creative and cultural practice. Supported by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council over a period of four years, each Fellow will focus on a research theme which responds to the biggest challenges faced by the creative industries and wider society, and the change needed for the development and survival of the sector and future economic growth. The Fellowships form part of AHRC’s PORTIA (participatory and open research through technology in action) programme which seeks to create the spaces, places and platforms that enable creativity-led R&D to thrive.

The grant is awarded to the RSC as the first and only performing arts Independent Research Organisation status (IRO) in the UK, and the Fellowships are open to artists, researchers and those working in the performing arts anywhere in the world. The programme has been developed in collaboration with seven global organisations including Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Music Center, Watershed, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio, Stanford Arts, and TORCH - The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, Humanities Division, University of Oxford. Each will also host Fellows throughout the year to support their research and development.

RSC Co-Artistic Directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, said:

“As the only UK performing arts organisation with Independent Research Organisation status, we’re thrilled to be collaborating with these incredible organisations and their fellows during the course of the year. Our focus is artist-led research, and the positive impact it can bring about within our cultural industries and our society. The AHRC funding enables us to collaborate deeply with artists and researchers, as well as organisations from a variety of sectors, to examine the myriad ways in which we can ensure our creative industries can thrive and help grow the UK economy.”

The nine Fellows include Stephen Bailey, Jemma Desai, Janice Duncan, Tabitha Jackson, Scarlett Kim, Akhila Krishnan, Amy Rose, Amahra Spence and Nami Weatherby (see below for full biogs). Their research will explore some of the biggest questions facing the creative and cultural sector today including trust and reality in the age of AI, change-making within creative institutions, integrating traditional and innovative workflows, places where ‘liveness’ happens - from stage to site-specific to the metaverse, immersive exhibitions and best-practice for co-creation with audiences, approaches to storytelling in an immersive landscape, artmaking through a disabled-lens, and the role of the artist as an agent of social change in the archive.

Ruthie Doyle, RSC Digital Associate - Artists, Fellowships, and Research, said: 

“We have assembled an incredible group of nine fellows and seven collaborators from a wide variety of backgrounds. Together they are taking steps to imagine what the cultural sector could be, and the infrastructures needed to support that. This programme marks the start of an international community of artists who are thinking deeply about what a more inclusive cultural landscape looks like: a landscape that’s less hierarchical and more interdisciplinary, and that’s built on the principles of collaboration and experimentation.”

The Fellows will have access to state-of-the-art equipment through a further AHRC grant to upgrade facilities for creative and cultural research (CResCa). The funding will support the RSC to develop its creative research capability with scope to use the new, immersive technologies to explore motion capture, photogrammetry, volumetric capture and Lidar scanning to create 3D models - harnessing interactivity and innovation for storytelling.

AHRC Executive Chair, Professor Christopher Smith, added:

“The UK’s creative and cultural industries are hugely important economically and socially, at home and globally. Yet there are challenges in building a sustainable and healthy future for the sector, which can only be addressed through research led by and for the sector.   By investing in more creative, collaborative ways of working, AHRC is empowering the RSC to develop new networks for artists to take risks, and share knowledge and best practice, while attracting a diverse pool of talent to ensure we maintain and strengthen a vitally important sector for our world today and for our future growth.”

A call for a new cohort of 2025-26 Fellows will open in the Autumn of 2024. The current Fellows and collaborators will reconvene in Stratford-upon-Avon in summer 2025 for a Festival of Ideas, supported by a grant from the Rothschild Foundation. They will share their research findings and potential opportunities for the sector.