Melissa is a scribbler of poetry and flash fiction. Quite to her surprise, a number of these untidy glimpses into her mind have been published. She's passionate about inclusion and mental health and often draws on her own awkward relationship with anxiety, insomnia and depression as she strings words together.
Twitter: @sarsaparilla191
Website: sarsaparilla72.wordpress.com
Joy is a Cornish, retired TEFL teacher/trainer/inspector who also organised the first Kent Women’s Day and WEA feminist conferences. Locally, she is involved with Older Women Rock and Write Like a Grrrl! She loves her new life, drumming, DJing and updating acres of writing for her blog.
Website: pascoespieces.weebly.com
Lubna’s vision is to create kind spaces where everyone feels safe to be seen, stand up and speak out. As a creative facilitator and applied theatre practitioner, she designs and delivers experiential training & videos for professionals on leadership skills including having impactful conversations, workplace wellbeing and neurodiversity awareness.
Twitter: @lubnagemarielle
Instagram: @LubnaGem
Website: http://lubnagemarielle.com
Jane is a playwright, health and wellbeing coach. She explores where mindset, taking ownership, and showing up to evolve better health, energy and longevity meets putting our health into 'the-system's' hands and/or deciding that 'rock-bottom' really is the only place to start.
Twitter & LinkedIn @JaneUnsworth
www.facebook.com/groups/whatisefttapping
Tracy Gentles is the Director of The Sick of the Fringe. She collaborates with artists and activists concerned with raising awareness and discussion around taboo issues, such as, mental health, assisted suicide, sex, race and ageing by building resources, contexts and networks, nurturing organisations and arts managers and aiming for a systemic change towards a more diverse, care-focused and socially conscientious sector.
Twitter: @TracyGentles / @TSOTFringe
As well as being a playwright and theatre director, Tian is also an arts producer, often specifically in community engagement and creative learning. He founded the theatre company New Slang Productions in 2009 and staged his first two plays Silver Shores (2012) and Changing State (2015). His work is usually based around social issues and communities.
Tian is The Sick of The Fringe's 2017 Engagement Producer and the bonafide #FringeNewbie. Alongside assisting on TSOTF events throughout the month, curating TSOTF Live Encounters and managing the Twitter account throughout August, he spent the month chatting to as many lovely Fringe artists as possible about wellbeing, access, success and self-care.
WEBSITE: newslangproductions.com
TWITTER: @tianglasgow
Brian Lobel is co-director of The Sick of the Fringe with Tracy Gentles. Brian is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at University of Chichester, a Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow, a Core Artist for Forest Fringe and an Associate Artist with Performing Medicine. His performance work has been shown extensively in a variety of contexts internationally, and his publications include both academic journals, chapters and reviews, as well as creative texts, scripts and artist DVDs.
@blobelwarming
Alexandrina Hemsley’s performance and choreographic practices are collaborative and frequently interdisciplinary, which she sees as a way of keeping knowing active and open. The work she make aims to reclaim and celebrate her identities as a mixed-race woman & tries to engage with the various cultural frameworks that mark her body on her own terms. Alexandrina is one part of duo Project O with Jamila Johnson-Small and she is currently working with Seke Chimutengwende on ‘afrofuturist’ duet Black Holes.
Blog: http://feministshakedown.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @AlexandrinaHem
Image courtesy of artist.
Dr. Kate Porcheret is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research is focused on sleep and circadian rhythms in relation to mental health. In particular she is interested in understand the role sleep plays in the response to psychological trauma.
Michael is a science writer at the Wellcome Trust and Associate Editor of its longform publication, Mosaic. Before writing about medical research for a living, Michael wrote plays, the best of which was Time Out's Critics' Choice when it was performed in London in 2002. In his student days, he performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe twice - winning a Fringe First Award in 1996 remains one of his proudest achievements.
WEBSITE: CERTAINCONFUSION.WORDPRESS.COM
TWITTER: @MPR2020
Alistair Lax trained as a biochemist and has moved around the biological sciences, taking in microbiology, cancer and cell biology. He’s been at King’s College London for the past 20 years.
Alistair is enthusiastic about most science, and in particular the history of science and medicine. He is also interested in public attitudes to science. His book, Toxin, is partly a history of microbiology.
Lynn Ruth Miller has been remodeling facts since her mother first asked, “Who ate that Hershey Bar?” She began writing the moment she realized that anything on paper is accepted as truth. She became a professional writer the year she won a silver dollar for her thumbnail biography of newspaper columnist, Dorothy Thompson, the Blue-Eyed Tornado of journalism in the forties and fifties. From that moment forward, Miller determined to be even more blunt, outspoken and outrageous than her role model.
Lynn started doing comedy on stage aged 71, and was dubbed 'the new Joan Rivers of Fringe Comedy' at the Edinburgh Fringe 2015. Now 83, she has accumulated numerous awards and is the oldest performing female stand up comedian in the UK.
Dr Kat Arney is a science writer and broadcaster whose work has featured on BBC Radio 4, the Naked Scientists and more. She has just published her first book, Herding Hemingway's Cats (Bloomsbury Sigma), about how our genes work.
WEBSITE: KATARNEY.COM
TWITTER: @HARPISTKAT
Lewis Church is lead writer for The Sick Of The Fringe. He has co-ordinated writers at the Edinburgh Fringe from 2017-2019, at Folkestone's Normal? Festival of the Brain 2017 and 2018, Strike A Light 2018, Manchester International Festival 2017 and at Women and Children First in Ghent (Belgium).
He is a writer and academic based in London, whose work has also been published in PAJ, Exeunt, Loose Lips, East End Review, The Art Story and Something Other. Lewis has also produced commissioned pieces for SPILL Festival of Performance, ]performancespace[ and the Live Art Development Agency, and teaches at Birkbeck University of London. He has previously taught at Queen Mary University of London, the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. As an artist and producer he has worked with Ron Athey, Vaginal Davis, Franko B, Bobby Baker, Split Britches, Shabnam Shabazi, Sh!t Theatre and others.
WEBSITE: LEWISCHURCH.BLOGSPOT.CO.UK
TWITTER: @LEWISACHURCH
Maddy writes about theatre and music. She contributes to Exeunt and the Guardian, blogs at Deliq, edits the blog New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood in association with Fuel, and co-curates Something Other with Mary Paterson. She is resident critic with Chris Goode & Company.
WEBSITE: STATEOFDELIQUESCENCE.BLOGSPOT.CO.UK
TWITTER: @MADDYDELIQUETTE
Kate is reading Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She was Deputy Editor of the National Student Drama Festival’s magazine Noises Off, won the Sunday Times Harold Hobson Student Drama Critic Award and writes for Epigram and Exeunt. She was Equalities Officer for the University’s Volleyball Club.
WEBSITE: KATEWYVER.WORDPRESS.COM
TWITTER: @KATEWYVER
