Katja Hilevaara is a practitioner-researcher and teacher, whose work reflects on, and engages with acts of memory/mis-memory as creative critique, constraint-led performance and ideas surrounding maintenance, enchantment and becoming. Katja's performance and installation work has been presented in London and around the UK and Europe, in sites such as the Rag Factory and Resistance Gallery in London, and at venues such as the Camden People’s Theatre, Drill Hall, BAC, ICA and the Shunt Lounge, also in London; as well as Manchester Green Room, Edinburgh Traverse and Studio T in Utrecht. Further details and images of her work can be found on her website, www.katjahilevaara.com.

Academic qualifications

Katja has degrees from Queen Mary University of London (PhD and MA) and Goldsmiths (BA). 

Teaching

Katja has taught at Goldsmiths since 2000, and she has convened and tutored most of the undergraduate practice-led courses over the years. She taught the TM3: Live Art module until 2010 and has since been teaching on Questions of Performance and Theatre Making 2, as well as supervising MA in Performance Making students. 

Her teaching experience ranges from devising, directing, dramaturgy and performing to Live Art and installation and from performance analysis and contemporary European performance to 20th c theatre and criticism and postdramatic practices in performance. Her recent practice-led research contributes to a range of courses she teaches. 

Katja is also a Teaching Associate at Queen Mary and has taught at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of Roehampton and Kingston University. 

Professional activities

Katja has written a chapter in Matthew Reason and Anja Lindelöf’s forthcoming book Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance, which draws on her PhD research and defines ’memory response’ as a critical performance practice, which, instead of writing in response to performance, engages in a process of making performance. She has also co-authored an exposition in an online journal Ruukku on artistic research with collaborator Dr Emily Orley. Also with Orley, they have secured a contract with Routledge for The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice, due to be published in 2017, which is an edited collection that brings together a range of examples of interdisciplinary methods to engage creatively yet critically with one’s own and others’ practices, introducing ways to discuss and analyse artistic work without compromising the creative drive that inspired the work in the first place. 

Katja is also involved in an ongoing performance collaboration with Orley, which has included maintenance performances (Maintain, Manu Tenere, To Hold in the Hand), a range of performance installations (Brief Encounters (or The Breaking of Images) and performative papers (which have to date come under the heading Making Making Matter), delivered at arts venues and international conferences. They are interested in exploring ideas surrounding domestic labour and the ethics of delight, image-making, place and the ephemerality of performance, but also promoting the value of practice research in the Academy.