Claire MacDonald is a writer, activist and Unitarian minister. Starting as a performance maker with Impact Theatre which she co-founded in the late 1970s, her career has combined community engagement, performance making and writing with leadership posts in Higher Education and the cultural sector. After 10 years with Impact, she took up a Judith Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University and later became Head of Theatre at Dartington College of Arts. She ran the Cambridge Darkroom Gallery in the early 1990s, and lived in Washington DC for seven years where she was Director of InterArts at George Mason University. She has also held positions as Director of the International Centre for Fine Art Research at University of Arts London and at the Norwegian Theatre Academy and most recently a professorial fellow at Central School of Speech and Drama. She is a Contributing Editor to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, in New York, and was co-founder of the arts journal, Performance Research, where she edited special issues on risk, silence, letters, and the voice.
An interest in religion and ethics has run throughout Claire’s work. Her writing has explored questions of what it means to be human in a secular world, and what the relationship might be between the sacred and lived experience.
She is currently the Minister at Lewisham Unity in South London.
Contact details: justrevclaire@gmail.com
In this conversation Claire and Sorrel talk about Claire’s career in the Arts, Claire’s concept of the divine (the More), her work with Lewisham Unity, and the relationship between the arts and spirituality, as well as their shared experience of growing up together.
