Helen Tennison

Helen Tennison is a multi-award winning theatre director, writer and maker. Her work spans Shakespeare, devised physical theatre, new writing, site-specific and cross-disciplinary theatre.

For Vienna’s English Theatre she directed Twelfth Night and Blue Stockings (the later with students of Vienna’s English Theatre Academy - VETA). She also adapted and directed Hecuba with students at VETA.

She has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed numerous times for Midsummer Scene Shakespeare Festival in Croatia and taken work to Bermuda Festival, Stockholm Festival, as well as numerous UK venues and festivals in including Theatre Royal Winchester, the Arcola and Soho Theatre. Her recent production Everything I See I Swallow, which won an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, featured aerial rope and examined intergenerational feminism.

Helen has led numerous theatre projects within the community, in prisons and young offenders institutions. As part of the Belgrade Theatre Community department, she led theatre projects for the youth theatre, young refugees, older people and workshops in theatre for confidence and good mental health. She regularly teaches and directs in universities and drama schools and between 2013-22 regularly took up the post of Artist in Residence at the University of South Florida. From 2015-17 Helen was Artistic Director of the Two Year Acting Course at Drama Studio London.

Recent work includes Forgive Me (about the link between gaming and autism), Shirley Valentine (with Copenhagen’s English Theatre), Dirty Corset (which won a WOW award at the Bergan Fringe in 2021 and is now touring the UK) and writing and directing Navigating Margaret, a large cast heritage and community production based on reminiscence work with people living with dementia. When she returns to the UK she will be directing Much Ado About Nothing in an adventure playground in Oxford and touring her solo lecture-performance Doggerland, about the area of land that joined the UK to the rest of Europe until it flooded at the end of the last ice age. Doggerland is funded by Arts Council England and supported by Bathway Theatre, where she was Artist in Residence and Het Zuidiljk Toneel, Netherlands.