Drama St Mary's Announce First Director

Drama St Mary’s are delighted to announce the appointment of its first Director Imogen Bond who joins us from The Orange Tree Theatre.

Imogen is no stranger to St Mary’s having visited us as a lecturer and workshop leader frequently over the past ten years, she was also instrumental in co-authoring and providing The Orange Tree’s input into our ground-breaking collaborative MA Directing programme. She is currently studying for her PhD which explores the cultural and phenomenological roots of the curtain call.

Imogen brings a wealth of experience as a director and creative education practitioner and for the last six years has run the Education and Participation department at The Orange Tree.

Their outreach work engages with over 10,000 people, often developing work which enriches curriculum and supports the inclusion of underrepresented groups in interactive participatory theatre making projects. The impact of this work was recently celebrated in a feature piece published in The Guardian.

As well as her work as a manager Imogen has an impressive track record of directing work, often for  young or family audiences. Immediately prior to joining us she will reprise her critically acclaimed show ‘Can’t Wait for Christmas!’ which played to delighted audiences last December.

Mark Griffin, Head of Humanities and Creative Industries commented, "There has been a Drama department at St Mary’s for over 50 years but Imogen’s appointment marks a wonderful  new chapter as we begin to define ourselves as an autonomous Drama School within the University, offering all the rigorous training of a top conservatoire, but within an accessible fee structure and all the resource benefits that belonging to a larger institution brings. We’re thrilled that she will be joining us to consolidate the progress made over a number of years and to lead us into an exciting new chapter of our development."