Simon Bayly

Simon is currently co-leader of the postgraduate research programme at the Guildhall School Music & Drama. 

He works broadly in the fields of live art and performance and is open to supervising MPhil/PhD projects in the following areas: participatory and socially-engaged forms of art practice; performance and live art; art and ecology; the meanings of work and labour within artistic milieux; the material and social architectures of performance and place-making; philosophies of performance; the psychodynamics of groups and organizations; intersections of performance and psychoanalysis. 

He started his professional career as Associate Director responsible for international development at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, directed the London-based live arts company PUR, active between 1992 and 2008 and has a long-standing interest in the psychodynamics of groups, studying for postgraduate qualifications in psychoanalytic approaches to organization at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust and the Institute of Group Analysis.

He held the position of Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance the University of Roehampton, London from 2006-2022, where he taught at BA, MA and PhD levels and co-directed the MA in Performance & Creative Research.

From 2017-2020, he led Acts of Assembly, a project exploring artistic and political forms meeting, gathering and assembling, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship. With Johanna Linsley, he edited the spring 2024 issue of the journal Performance Research 'On Meeting', which brought together a variety of artistic and academic perspectives on this topic. 

Publications include the book A Pathognomy of Performance (Routledge, 2011), book chapters and essays on the meeting as a social genre, the project as the unit of contemporary work, the anxieties of dramaturgy, the politics of object-oriented ontologies, the value of waste and the forces of vibration.

He is a board member of the UK Cohousing Network, where he works on a range of projects supporting the development of community-led housing in the UK.