Mark trained at Oxford School of Drama. He has won the Alan Bates Award, the Old Vic New Voices Award and has been nominated ‘Best Actor’ at the Off West End Awards. He is also a guest Director at RADA.
M. J. HARDING
Writer
M. J. studied Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, and was classically trained as a musician, before co-founding the band that became Fat White Family.
M. J. began his career as a dramatist in 2009, when he completed the Royal Court Young Writers Programme and began writing for performances in warehouses, squats and galleries across London, including LimaZulu, Topophobia and Anatum’s Abode.
Removal Men is M. J. Harding’s first full-length work for theatre.
JAY MILLER
Director
Jay Miller is Founder and Artistic Director of The Yard Theatre, which he founded in 2011 in collaboration with Practice Architecture and a team of volunteers. Prior to founding this, Jay had been making work in the North of England with West Yorkshire Playhouse, Arc Theatre and Live Theatre.
Jay’s credits for The Yard Theatre are The Mikvah Project written by Josh Azouz, which played a sold-out, extended run and received critical acclaim (“Miller’s assured direction delivers maximum poignancy”
In 2011, Jay was invited to train as part of the National Theatre’s Directing Course, and in 2013 Jay was named by The Guardian as one of the most influential people working in culture today. He also won the British Council Creative Entrepreneur Award 2013, part of the h club 100, for which he travelled to Brazil with the British Council to expand his international network and share ideas.
BETHANY WELLS
Designer
Bethany is a performance designer working across dance, theatre and installation, with particular interest in site-specific and devised performance. With a background in architecture, she enjoys exploring spatial dramaturgy and how space communicates through time in performance.
Recent work includes: Removal Men (The Yard Theatre), Dark Corners (Battersea Arts Centre), Seen and Not Heard, Complicite Creative Learning, (Southbank Centre), and the ongoing Other Acts of Public WARMTH, a wood-fired mobile sauna and performance space, commissioned by Compass Live Art and touring throughout 2016/17.
Theatre includes: Desire Paths (Third Angel), Sheffield Crucible Fun Palaces, TANJA (UK tour), FADoubleGOT, (UK tour), Assisted Suicide: The Musical (Southbank Centre), The Factory (Royal Exchange Young Company), THE FUTURE (Company 3, The Yard Theatre), 10,000 Smarties (Old Fire Station), FUSE (Sheffield Crucible Studio), Late Night Love (Eggs Collective), Live Art Dining (Live Art Bistro), Race Cards (Selina Thompson), Correspondence (Old Red Lion Theatre), Dancing Bear (West Yorkshire Playhouse, Contact Theatre), A Local Boy (UK tour), Partus (Third Angel).
JONAH BRODY
Composer
Jonah Brody is an International award-winning composer, writer and multi-instrumentalist. He has collaborated with artists and performers in India, Taiwan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Canada and Japan as well as in London and around the UK. Now based in East London, he performs regularly around the UK and Europe with psychedelic dance bands Loose Meat and Super Best Friends Club, and composes for film and theatre. His writing for folklorist Sam Lee earned him a Mercury Prize nomination and won Songlines Album of the Year 2016. His current work includes making music for award-winning storyteller Ben Haggarty. He has also written music for Motherland (Young Vic, House of Lords) and for projects at the V&A Museum and British Museum.
Jonah has previously worked with Music in Detention, making music and performance in Immigration Removal Centres, and he currently collaborates with Rosetta Life, creating music with and for victims of strokes and dementia, in hospitals around London.
He did fieldwork in Bali on Shadow Puppetry and sacred art, and he would like you to buy him an ice cream.
JOSHUA PHARO
Lighting and Projection Designer
Joshua works as a Lighting and Projection Designer across theatre, dance, opera, music, film and art installation.
Recent credits include: Burning Doors (Belarus Free Theatre), Broken Biscuits (Paines Plough), THE FUTURE (Company Three, The Yard Theatre), Contractions (Sheffield Crucible); Julie (Northern Stage), We’re Stuck! (China Plate), Giving (Hampstead), Iphigenia Quartet, In The Night Time (Before The Sun Rises), Medea (Gate Theatre), The Rolling Stone (Orange Tree Theatre), The Glass Menagerie (Nuffield Theatre, as Video Designer), The Merchant of Venice, Wuthering Heights, Consensual (Ambassadors Theatre), The Crocodile (Manchester International Festival), One Arm (Southwark Playhouse), The Trial Parallel, A Streetcar Named Desire Parallel (Young Vic), Amadis De Gaulle (Bloomsbury Theatre), Beckett Season (Old Red Lion Theatre), The Deluge (UK Tour, Lila Dance), Usagi Yojimbo (Southwark Playhouse), Pioneer (UK Tour, Curious Directive), I’d Rather Goya Robbed Me of My Sleep, No Place Like Home (Gate Theatre), Thumbelina (UK Tour, Dancing Brick).
JOSH ANIO GRIGG
Sound Designer
Josh Anio Grigg is a producer, sound designer and artist from London. Grigg completed a Drama, Theatre and Performance degree at Roehampton University of Surrey in 2008. He has designed sound for many spaces across London as well as creating and performing music in festivals across Europe.
Theatre and performance includes Love (National Theatre), i ride in colour and soft focus, no longer anywhere (Dance Umbrella), Beyond Caring (The Yard Theatre, National Theatre, UK Tour, Chicago), Made Visible (The Yard Theatre), Parallel Macbeth (Young Vic), Lines (The Yard Theatre), Fuck the Polar Bears (Bush Theatre), Three Studies in Flesh for a Female (European Tour), The Mikvah Project (The Yard Theatre), Anarchy and Religion (Jermyn Street Theatre), Judgement Day (Emmanuel Centre).
PROJECT O
Movement Directors
Project O (the collaborative supernova between Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small) make work that aims to continually address, reevaluate, intervene, comment upon, resist and celebrate the fallout from being born black, mixed and female in 21st Century UK.
In the folding, seemingly endless weight of structural racism (obvious or latent) and white supremacy that has rendered so many invisible and unheard, the politics of Project O are intimate and urgent. They craft choreographic scores and environments to celebrate, challenge and exorcise. Their work is driven by an engagement with dance practices but the creative outcome includes works ranging from shows for theatres to performance lectures, free schools and DJ sets. Project O experiment with alternative ways their bodies can be present and visible (on stage or off), and ways they can be present and visible in our bodies for themselves. One of Project