Heather Ackroyd, artist / director / performer, born 1959 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, UK. Studied Creative Arts at Crewe & Alsager College in Cheshire, graduating with a BA (Hons) First Class in 1980, where she developed an early interest in multidisciplinary art practice and experimental performance, working with seedling grass to make sculpture. Whilst at college Ackroyd and fellow colleagues, co-founded Optik, a theatre-making process based on the interplay between image, sound, action, expression and humour.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ackroyd was active at the forefront of contemporary theatre-performance, devising critically acclaimed work that toured extensively in the UK and international festivals in Europe, USA and Canada. She has worked with Impact Theatre Co-operative (1984-1986), Lumiere & Son (1986), Hidden Grin (1986), Graeme Miller (1987/1990/1999), Gary Stevens (1987/2007), The People Show (1991) and director Katie Mitchell at the Royal Shakespeare Company (1992). In 1988, she received Arts Council funding to develop, design and direct Uses of Enchantment, an original theatre piece for six performers, exploring fairytale, myth and desire within the garden. Ackroyd grew a large ‘flying’ grass carpet from seed that transformed the barren garden into a lush idyll. The work premiered at The Place, London in 1988, with a subsequent tour across the UK 1990-1991. She also grew a life-size grass camel reflecting on the impacts of global warming as reported in 1988 by American climatologist James Hansen. In 1991, she devised and directed Swallow Words with theatre students at Leicester Polytechnic.
By integrating living botanical elements with experimental theatre techniques, Ackroyd’s initial projects revealed a foundational performative ethos. These early works explored the intersections of multidisciplinary collaboration, gender identity and emerging climate science through innovative, devised methodologies.
