Dr Adelle Hulsmeier

Home / About / Academic staff profiles / Performing Arts / Adelle Hulsmeier

Associate Professor of Partnerships and Participatory Practice

I am Associate Professor for Partnerships and Participatory Practice, a Principal Lecturer, and Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Screen Performance. I teach Screen Performance and Performing Arts courses.

I am Global Partnership Lead for Greece and Cyprus (AAS, DEI, and Ledra).

I am an External Examiner for BA (Hons) Drama, Theatre and Performance at Queen Margaret University, Scotland, and Belfast Metropolitan College on behalf of The Open University.

I am a Senior Fellow of Advance HE. Winner of a National Teaching Fellowship Award (NTFS, 2020), Winner of a Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE, 2019), graduate of Advanced HE's Aurora Programme for Leadership Development for Women in HE (2022).

I achieved my PhD in Shakespeare in 2019. I have an MA (with Distinction) from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, and a BA (Hons) in Drama and Theatre Studies from the University of Hull.

I manage the collaboration with Northumbria Police, and I have also developed and led the academic partnership with Live Theatre, Newcastle. I have created extensive links and networks with clients external to the University and attempted to embed external engagement opportunities across the curriculum. Ensuring students experience authentic workplace experience, ahead of graduation, has become the heart of my passion for capturing their innate innovation and creativity, which ensures a visionary, yet achievable focus for the curriculum.

My career trajectory and teaching have been characterised by my conviction to embed the notion of social change as an integral part of teaching and learning, which in turn impacts a capacity to drive positive change through a transformative educational experience. My teaching focuses on collaborative learning, transcending institutional and civic boundaries, and driving and underpinning curricula with participatory action research which develops the critical reflexivity of students.

My research is threefold.
1) Embedding employability in the curriculum via client-led and academic/industry collaborations. Creating an exchange platform for sharing good practice and enhancing the scope for further collaborative approaches to the curriculum and pedagogy.
2) Participatory practice, creating work that is led by the community and for the community, mostly to create social change and transformative educational experience.
3) Shakespeare and Applied Theatre and how Shakespeare's plays may contribute to a socially transformative encounter.

I teach modules that are rooted in social change, the theory and practice of acting and performance, applied theatre, Shakespeare, screen performance, and multi-disciplinary performance in the areas of cabaret and popular performance.

Teaching and supervision
Research
Publications
Areas of expertise
Further information

Teaching and supervision

I teach BA (Hons) Performing Arts and BA (Hons) Screen Performance.

Module Leader:

Screen Showcase
Cabaret
TV Drama Projects**
Multi-Platform Performance

Module Tutor:

Approaches to Creative Practice*
Independent Study

*Since 2015 I have actively strengthened partnership collaborations, shaping and managing a partnership between the University and Live Theatre, Newcastle. This coincides with the planning and delivery of a range of modules within Performing Arts, (Approaches to Creative Practice, Screen Showcase, Creative Enterprise Project, Final Showcase). The partnership aims to; afford relationships with theatre members and increase their capacity and capability in delivering module content to the students, provide the student body with networking opportunities with a range of professionals working in the industry, and give the students access to the operational workings of a contemporary, professional theatre and its programme. This offers a more vocational focus to student learning and these encounters are aimed to offer confidence and identify pathways into the creative industries.

** Since 2013 I introduced and continue to manage the collaborative relationship with Northumbria Police, affording drama and film production students, particularly those taking the module TV Drama Projects, the opportunity to produce and act in films that increase awareness of complex category serious crime.

Research interests for potential research students

Shakespeare
Applied theatre
Performance
Screen performance
Drama education
Theatre for social change
Enterprise and entrepreneurship on the curriculum

Research

Active research projects:

Local Theatres: Participation, Inclusion, Imagination

Project Co-Lead, Sunderland
A major study of local theatres across the UK relative to where localism has re-entered the political lexicon.
This research aims to transform understanding of theatre-making as local, hyperlocal, and translocal practices. Our objectives are to:

1) Strengthen understanding of local theatres as inclusive cultural and community assets by engaging a wide range of stakeholders.
2) Extend understanding of inclusive approaches to theatre-making, producing, and programming across amateur, professional, and youth contexts.
3) Support local talent by identifying creative opportunities and skills development in their home towns and cities, enabling progression to paid employment.
4) Inspire theatre-makers to re-imagine what 'local' means in the past, present and future by co-creating theatre that raises difficult questions about historical injustices and hidden exclusions.
5) Understand the impact of increased localised decision-making on theatre as local cultural assets.

Our approaches to knowledge-generation are designed to benefit theatre-makers as artists and theatres as organisations. Our findings will inform policy agendas by clarifying the cultural politics of localism, and evidence the value of sustainable local theatres.

Embedding Employability on the Curriculum

In a joint research project with Hayley Jenkins, our project collates a 'live' exchange of enterprising innovations currently embedded in curricula across our faculty as a means of articulating good practice and enhancing the scope for more successful collaborative approaches to pedagogical practice and entrepreneurship education. Our project:

Shares practical guidance to support colleagues in embedding enterprise within the curriculum
Provides a platform to share good practice and navigate challenges in embedding enterprise in the curriculum
Enhances embedded industrial practices, collaborations, and innovations.

Participatory Practice

1) Partnership with Northumbria Police
I manage the collaboration with Northumbria Police, and sustain and nurture the partnership which affords performance and film production students the opportunity to produce films that increase awareness of complex category serious crime. Invaluable as a training resource for the police and invested partners from counselling services, law, healthcare, secondary, tertiary, and Higher Education*, these films are integrated into education and training. All collaborate with our Level 6 undergraduates. To date, over 50 films have been produced by approximately 1000+ students. All films have addressed key issues of serious crime including the capacity to consent, sexual exploitation, domestic violence, cyber-safety, modern-day slavery, male rape, county lines, policing during covid, and Peer on Peer abuse.

*Changing Lives, Sunderland Counsellors, Edge North East, SARC, Slater & Gordon, Association of Chief Police Officers, Healthcare Professionals (e.g. GPs, GUM services, University Wellbeing Departments, Accident and Emergency Departments), and Voluntary Organisations

Past research projects:

National Theatre's Public Acts, in collaboration with Royal Holloway, University of London

Public Acts builds sustained partnerships with theatre and community organisations across the UK that share a vision of theatre as a force for change. In collaboration with Royal Holloway, I employed a research assistant to work closely with Sunderland Empire and the Fire Station, Sunderland. Collaboratively we created an end report that combined an analysis of both individual and community benefits, for participants of the City of Sunderland, around career opportunities through participation in theatre and the arts.

Blast Beach: Reading the Rocks

Principal Investigator, project manager, producer, and coordinator for Sea Air project: Reading the Rocks. This project was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This was a multi-media-based project based around and informed by interviews with communities who are living around and/or influenced by Blast Beach, Seaham. Over a six-month period, varying individuals were interviewed to create a documentary that highlights the influence of the coast upon the people who live and are influenced by it. Geologists, East Durham Artist's Network (EDAN), miners, and local community members will be interviewed about the coast and its meaning and influence on their work, practice, and everyday lives. This work was screened at EDAN's Maglime exhibition and again as part of Seaham Carnival.

Shakespeare and Applied Theatre

My research into Shakespeare within Applied Theatre settings explores the challenges faced when combining Shakespeare’s plays for purposes of transformation. It explores how applied theatre may embody strains between the instrumental and the transformative. It undertakes a historical reading of a range of Shakespeare’s works in order to demonstrate the importance of the cultural, political, and historical contexts of Shakespeare’s plays. It explores the intentions of applied theatre within three salient community settings (prison, disability, and therapy) exploring how Shakespeare’s work is used within these settings and why. All aspects are explored in order to demonstrate how the challenge of making Shakespeare’s plays work in an applied theatre setting is more complex than it may at first appear.

1. Shakespeare' Disabled, Disabled Shakespeare (2020) Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice: Bloomsbury Press, ISBN 9781350140387
2. Applied Shakespeare: A Transformative Encounter? (2023) Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, ISBN 978-3-031-45413-4

My research outputs are relevant to the areas of drama for social change, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, partnership and client-led curriculum design and action-based research.

Publications

Number of items: 11.

Article

Hulsmeier, Adelle and Jenkins, Hayley (2021) Enterprise Exchange: Analysing the levels of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Activity Embedded in Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries (FACI) Programmes at the University of Sunderland. Embedding Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education: A Case Study Series. (In Press)

Hulsmeier, Adelle (2020) Working beyond end-point assessments to deliver employability experiences: The University of Sunderland’s Crime Awareness student film projects in collaboration with Northumbria Police and its Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC). Enhancing Graduate Employability: a case study compendium. pp. 11-15.

Book Section

Hulsmeier, Adelle (2021) Understanding Signature Pedagogies: How film can tackle important civic issues. In: The CATE Collection: Together in Collaborative Educational Leadership. Advance HE. ISBN 9781916359369

Hulsmeier, Adelle (2020) Shakespeare's Diabled: Disabled Shakespeare. In: The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice. Bloomsbury Press, London. ISBN 9781350140387

Hulsmeier, Adelle (2020) It’s warm up North: training and opportunities for actors living in North East England. In: Actors' and Performers' Yearbook 2021 Essential Contacts for Stage, Screen and Radio. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781350159471