Josephine Machon

Josephine is a practitioner-researcher working in the field of experiential performance and a leading scholar in immersive practice. Her current research investigates the role and influence of the audience-participant in interactive and instruction-led experiences and involves ongoing partnerships with internationally renowned companies, including Punchdrunk, Lundahl & Seitl and ZU-UK. Concerned with the socially engaged ways in which immersive practice can communicate and reimagine live(d) experience, she worked in partnership with the environmental charity, Global Action Plan (GAP) to launch its 'Luxury For All' campaign at 26 Leake Street, Waterloo Vaults, in October 2023. In collaboration with 'immersive world-builder', Meg Cunningham and students of Middlesex University’s Theatre programmes, it involved interactive storytelling and performance-installation, with audiences invited to explore what ‘luxury for all’ would look, sound and feel like, kickstarting a conversation about equitable public luxury as standard and as a solution to the climate and social inequalities crises. Widely published on immersive, interactive and ‘(syn)aesthetic’ performance. Following the success of The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia - 1st Edition (Routledge, 2019), reaching Amazon’s #1 ‘Bestseller’, #1 ‘Most Wanted’, #1 ‘Most Gifted’ in the Theatre & Performance charts on release and longlisted for The Society for Theatre Research Theatre Book Prize in 2020, Josephine is currently working on the second edition for Punchdrunk alongside the first edition of The Punchdrunk Enrichment Encyclopaedia (forthcoming 2025). Her monograph, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Bloomsbury, 2013) won ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ in the CHOICE Awards, 2014 and was shortlisted for The David Bradby TaPRA Award: 2015 and longlisted for The Society for Theatre Research Theatre Book Prize, 2014. Joint Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Series, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, which includes her co-edited collections alongside commissioned titles, she is also on the Editorial Board for The International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media and Body, Space & Technology, a journal of the Online Library of Humanities Library.