Dr Bryan Brown is an artist-scholar, currently Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter and co-director of cultural laboratory Maketank. For over a decade Brown was co-director of visual theatre company ARTEL (American Russian Theatre Ensemble Laboratory). In light of the ongoing Putinist aggression and the genocidal war in Ukraine, Brown’s current research works to redress the imperialist agendas of Russian theatre and cultural practices, including a reassessment of the humanist principles of the theatre laboratory. In March 2022, together with Olya Petrakova, Brown helped create the Devon Ukrainian Association (DUA), an organization which was formed to raise awareness about the war in Ukraine, support displaced Ukrainians and their UK hosts, and preserve and support Ukrainian culture. DUA has presented two UK tours of Lviv’s Word and Voice Theatre, partnered with Exeter Cathedral to host two Ukrainian Orthodox Easter Celebrations, presented an evening of the resurrected tradition of kobzar music, two exhibitions of Ukrainian war photography,  and have recently begun a Ukrainian language and culture school in Exeter. Brown and Petrakova have also been leading practitioner-researchers in the Worldwide Play Readings Project: Belarus and Ukraine, a project aimed at stopping the further rise of authoritarianism and increasingly addressing the history of genocide in Ukraine. His article on the beginnings of this project can be read here.

Email: B.Brown@exeter.ac.uk