Sudden Depth

Sam Trubridge is a performance designer, artist, and director with The Play Ground NZ. With this company he has created works and curated events in Oceania, Europe, and the Americas. He is  and associate editor (Oceania) for World Scenography, and artistic director of The Performance Arcade, an annual festival on Wellington Waterfront.

Morgan+Richards is a performance-collaboration between artist Sally J Morgan and writer Jess Richards. Morgan is a conceptual artist who has shown her artwork in galleries across the world. Richards is an award-winning author whose novels are published by Hodder and Stoughton. Both artists were born in Wales but now live in New Zealand. Together they blend the visual and the written word in performance/installations and video works that have been exhibited at galleries and international festivals in New York, Chicago, Dublin, The Bahamas, and Wellington NZ.

William learnt to swim at the age of 18 months and was freediving to 15m by the age of 8 but didn’t begin serious training for the sport until 2003. He broke his first world record diving without fins in April 2007 to 81m. Since then he has broken this record multiple times and is still the first and only human to descend deeper than 100m completely unassisted. William also holds the world record in Free Immersion with 124m (406 feet) set at Vertical Blue in May 2016.

Mick Douglas has presented work in Australia & New Zealand, India & Pakistan, and throughout Europe & North America. These works include socially engaged large scale public projects like W-11 Tram: an art of journeys commissioned by the cultural festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, and the ongoing tramjatra: imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by tramways, also a book in the same name. Recent solo durational performance projects Container Walk, Carriage and Return have been presented by The Performance Arcade. Mick curated Performing Mobilities, the Australian contribution to the PSI#21 Performance Studies international globally distributed 2015 project Fluid States. He also contributed to Fluid States events in Croatia, The Bahamas, Rarotonga, Japan, Melbourne, and the Philippines.

Strandvad (b. 1979) is a sociologist whose research concerns cultural production studies, creative work, and valuation processes. Her research has been published in Cultural Sociology, Visual Studies, Cultural Studies, and elsewhere. Her current research is about freediving and mermaiding. 

Amelia Taverner is a Costume Designer from Canada, currently living in Wellington, New Zealand. She has an interest in designing for all areas of performance; theatre, dance, opera, and film. In her performance design work she explores sustainability and current issues in projects like Asylum (The Performance Arcade 2016) and Cast Aways (Deep Anatomy 2015).

Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of Performing Arts at Northwestern University. She specializes in 19th-century British theatre history, gender and theatre, theatre historiography, and performance theory. Forthcoming books include “Uncle Tom’s Cabins: the Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book (Michigan, 2018) and the six-volume Cultural History of Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Denise Batchelor is a visual artist working primarily in digital media, both still and moving image. Batchelor’s work reflects personal encounters within nature; quiet moments of reflection within which deeper connections can be experienced. Batchelor has exhibited both nationally and internationally, graduating MFA (Hons) from Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design 2010.

Daan Verhoeven is a freediving photographer who photographs at most major free diving events. He studied Communication Arts in New York, and was a graphic designer for a publishing company before moving into photography. His work has been published in The Guardian, New York Times and National Geographic, among others. He is also working at translating many unpublished texts by his father, the Dutch philosopher Cornelis Verhoeven.