About Stephen
(he/they) – London, UK – Director and Theatre Maker. Hosted by TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, Humanities Division, University of Oxford.
Stephen is an award-winning director and theatre maker whose practice extends from digital work to the West End. Currently the Artistic Lead of NPO Vital Xposure, making innovative and political disabled-led work, Stephen won the 2022 Royal Theatrical Support Trust Sir Peter Hall Directors Award for their first mainstage show The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man at Nottingham Playhouse, Belgrade Coventry and Blackpool Grand. They have been a staff director at the National Theatre, resident assistant director at Chichester Festival Theatre and resident director for the European Theatre Convention.
Other work includes the Offie nominated Surfacing and Little Echoes; a residency with Barbican Open Lab; and collaboration with theatres including the Young Vic, Royal Court, Kiln, Half Moon, Finborough, Graeae and Camden People’s Theatre. Stephen is a two-time finalist for the Genesis Future Directors’ Award and have been funded by Arts Council England, Unlimited, Jerwood and Romilly Walton Masters Award. They read History at Cambridge specialising in gender theory and political thought, and trained at LAMDA, with the Young Vic, and Royal Shakespeare Company.
As a creative producer Stephen has worked on the multi-award-winning It’s a Motherf**king Pleasure, which recently transferred to Soho Playhouse New York and the sell-out national tour of That’s Not My Name. Much of Stephen’s work has involved collaboration with a cross-section of disabled artists and a creative foregrounding of the potential of access.