Professor Gabriella Giannachi (She / her)

Gabriella Giannachi, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, elected Member Academia Europaea, elected Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), is Professor in Performance and New Media, and Director of the Centre for Intermedia and Creative Technologies at the University of Exeter, which promotes advanced interdisciplinary research in creative technologies by facilitating collaborations between academics from a range of disciplines with cultural and creative organisations.

Professor Giannachi has published extensively on the documentation of performative and new media works, on presence and identity creation, and on the construction of a sense of place and the environment. Her publications include: On Directing, ed. with Mary Luckhurst (Methuen 1999); Staging the Post-avantgarde, co-authored with Nick Kaye (Peter Lang 2002); Virtual Theatres: an Introduction (Routledge 2004); Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, ed. with Nigel Stewart (Peter Lang 2005); The Politics of New Media Theatre (Routledge 2007); Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated, co-authored with Nick Kaye (MUP 2011), nominated in Theatre Library Association 44th Annual Book Awards (2012); Performing Mixed Reality, co-authored with Steve Benford (MIT Press 2011); Archaeologies of Presence, co-edited with Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks (Routledge 2012); Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (MIT Press 2016, repr. 2023 and Treccani 2022); Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic and Scholarly Practices, co-edited with Jonah Westerman (Routledge 2017); Moving Spaces, co-edited with Susanne Franco (Ca' Foscari University Press 2021); Documentation as Art, co-edited with Annet Dekker (Routledge 2023); Technologies of the Self-Portrait (Routledge 2022, repr. 2024 and Treccani 2023). She has published articles in Contemporary Theatre Review; Leonardo; Performance Research; Digital Creativity; Revista de Historia da Arte; Stedelijk Studies; and PAJ, and co-co-authored conference papers for ISEA 2010; IVA 2009, 9^th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents; CHI 2008; CHI 2009 (best paper award), CHI 2012 (best paper award); CHI 2013 (best paper award); CHI 2015; Museums and the Web.

Over the years, Professor Giannachi has been researching projects in partnerships with: Tate, the Science Museum Group, The Natural History Museum, The Photographers Gallery, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, the immersive media production company Factory 42, Exeter City FC Supporters Trust, Imperial War Museum, British Library, Stanford Libraries, National Archives, Bluesky AI, LI-MA, San Francisco Art Institute, Ludwig Boltzman Institute Media.Art.Research and Met Office Hadley Centre. She is currently researching a monograph on art and AI and looking into AI for art documentation in collaboration with the computer scientist Steve Benford at the University of Nottingham. She is also working on a retrofit project as part of the Green Transition programme and completing a monograph on environmental art with the archaeologist Michael Shanks at Stanford University.

Professor Giannachi has a BA in Modern Languages and Literatures, in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy from Turin University, and a PhD in English from Cambridge University, where she was awarded a scholarship by her College, Trinity Hall, to research the role of silence in modern European Drama.