Dr Olu Taiwo

Biography

Dr Olu Taiwo is Reader (Associate Professor) in Acting and digital research. He has worked on identity and performance and is a well-established performer using digital technologies. He is engaged with critical debates around the interaction of body, technology and the environment.

He has a background in Fine art, Street performance art, African percussion and various martial arts. He has performed nationally and internationally in performances and lecture demonstrations promoting concepts surrounding practice as research, including how practice explores relationships between ‘effort’, and ‘performative actions’. In 2020 he had a retrospective of his work as part of Wiltshire creatives ‘Artist of the week’ series.

He investigates performatively how as ‘individuals’ we interface with the increasing digital complexity with regards to our experience in twenty-first century society through is his technique has been developing called ‘Urban Butoh’; which, he developed as part of his performative involvement in Johannes Birringer’s Dap-lab project, Ukiyo.

He is Director of Transcultural Studies at the institute ‘the Making of the Actor’ based in Athens. He is a member of the University's Centre for Performance Practice and Research.

Publications

The Return Beat, in: Wood (Ed.); The Virtual Embodied. Routledge (1998).

Music, Art and Movement among the Yoruba, in: Harvey (Ed.): Indigenous Religions Cassell (2000)

Art as Eudaimonia: Embodied identities and the Return beat, in: Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (eds), Identity, performance and technology: practices of empowerment, embodiment and technicity. Palgrave Macmillan (2012)

The Return Beat - Interfacing with Our Interface, A Spiritual Approach to the Golden Triangle: Peter Lang (2021) 

Egungun - Moving the Masks of our Ancestors, in: C. welch and J. Shadrack (eds) Religion, Death and the Senses. Equinox Publishing, Religion and the Senses Series (2024)