Paul Sutton
Artistic Director
Paul is the founder and Artistic Director of C&T. Over the last twenty-three years he has accumulated a wealth of experience in theatre, learning and the arts and has an international reputation for his work with drama and young people.
This reputation is based on his innovative approach to making theatre with young people – creating challenging learning experiences rooted in the culture of children and young people and the technologies that dominate their lives.
Paul developed the livingnewspaper.com – C&T’s groundbreaking mix of documentary drama and ICT that has attracted users and admirers across the globe. He also developed C&T’s The Dark Theatre – mixing drama, storyboarding and comics, and Cambat, exploring young people’s attitudes to Closed Circuit Television and Lipsync, a project mixing performance and music video technologies. Most recently he has developed the 21st century rich media, mapping project Everymap.net and 2ndfolio.net, which blends barcodes, Shakespeare and handheld technologies.
He regularly contributes to international conferences in the field of Drama and Education, for example, at the International Drama Education Association World Congress in Hong Kong in 2007, the Shift Happens Conference at York Theatre Royal in 2008, and the American Alliance for Theatre in Education (San Francisco 2010 & New York 2011).
Paul is also an experienced performer and theatre director, working for two years as an actor touring in many plays for young people and directing and devising a number of Theatre-in-Education programmes for all ages and ability ranges. As well as his work in schools he has worked at the Swan Theatre, Worcester, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, Leicester Haymarket, Edinburgh Festival and Warwick Arts Centre.
Paul has a PGCE in Drama and taught for two years at John Masefield High School, Ledbury. He has taught in all phases of education – including preschool, after school and with people with learning and physical disabilities. He has also directed and managed numerous community-based life long learning initiatives.
He teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, both at the University of Worcester, and at the University of Kent. His extensive youth theatre experience has led him to Chair the National Association of Youth Theatre’s Regional Development Programme since 2002. In 2007 he completed his PhD on C&T’s innovative mix of drama and ICT at the University Of Kent.
Paul was a Council Member of Arts Council England, West Midlands from 2001-2008, helping to shape arts policy and practice for the whole region and nationally, and is a Trustee of the Sir Barry Jackson Theatre Trust.
