Speaker
Speaker
Speaker
Speaker
Persis Jade Maravala
ZU-UK
21 November
13.30
Mindset XR: Immersive Technology for Mental Health – The Story so Far 2022-2026
Persis Jade Maravala
Co-Founder / Artistic Director
Speaker Biography
Persis Jadé Maravala is Artistic Director of disabled-led award-winning interactive theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. Ethnically Iranian/Yemeni/Indian and raised in East London, Maravala is committed to reclaiming public spaces to reduce barriers to participation and fairer opportunities for working-class people. Recent work focuses on mediating relationships between strangers through the use of sound and instruction-based performance, and the application of serious games and XR technology within healthcare simulation and mental health therapies.
Her work has been commissioned by LIFT Festival, FACT Liverpool, Southbank Centre, Summerhall, British Council, Macau International Festival and the Brazilian Ministry for Culture. Persis-Jadé was a keynote speaker at FutureFest, SXSW and inaugural recipient of the Stephen Joseph Award for “groundbreaking work that widens the scope and imaginative possibilities of live and multimedia performance, her experiments with audience engagement, and her exploration of topics of direct relevance to diverse audiences in contemporary Britain”.
Maravala’s radical methodology has been taught as an MA in Contemporary Performance by Maravala and ZU-UK at the University of Greenwich. She has co-written the Post-Immersive Manifesto, following a 5-year collaboration between ZU-UK and T.A.G. (Montréal). Notable works include Within Touching Distance, Radio Ghost, Hotel Medea, Binaural Dinner Date, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight), #RioFoneHack, Goodnight Sleep Tight and Missing.