Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet magazine and Tutor in Critical Writing at the Royal College of Art. He is editor of Ruins (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011) and author of I Am Sitting in a Room (Cabinet, 2012), Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine hypochondriac lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005). He writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, frieze and Art Review. He lives in Canterbury.

Mark Down is co-artistic director of Blind Summit Theatre. He qualified as a doctor and re-trained as an actor at Central School of Speech and Drama. He writes, performs and directs for the company. 

Patrick Haggard leads a research group at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.  His research focuses on the mechanisms of voluntary action and bodily awareness.

Melissa Trimingham is co-founder and head of the University of Kent Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance. Her research specialisms are contemporary performance, puppetry and object theatre, scenographic space, Modernism, the Bauhaus stage and applied theatre. As co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Imagining Autism’, she is currently researching the connections between the materiality of performance, including puppetry, and the autistic perception of the world.

Sean Myatt has worked as a performer and director for the last 15 years and is now a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Design at Nottingham Trent University. He was Puppetry Curator for Scenofest at the Prague Quadrennial and is curating workshops for the World Stage Design 2013 exhibition in Cardiff. He trained in theatre design and while working with the Philippe Genty Company the combination of his design and puppetry training developed into what he describes as “live stage design”.

Ollie Evans is a puppeteer, performer and poet, making theatre and performance as a soloist and with his company, Dummy Company, since 2008. His work focuses primarily on objects and voices, and experiments with ventriloquism and language. Previous shows include: Dummies (2009), Stomunculus (2010), Glossia (2010) and Pogiff! (2011), an elegy for analogue based on Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate. He is currently studying for a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, on the performance of Finnegans Wake.

Kristin Fredricksson read philosophy and art history at the University of Cambridge before training with Jacques Lecoq from 1996 to 1998. She worked as a performer mainly outside the UK, before returning in 2009 to form Beady Eye Theatre, a UK-based structure for local and international collaborators to create innovative contemporary theatre. Beady Eye had a Puppet Centre Trust Residency at Farnham Maltings in 2011/12 and was part of Incubate 2011 (Little Angel Theatre/Central School of Speech and Drama). It is an associate of Theatre Royal Margate.

Ken Arnold is Head of Public Programmes at Wellcome Collection. He oversees an exciting variety of events and exhibitions at this a five-year old London venue that highlights the intriguing links between medicine, art and the rest of life for anyone who finds themselves incurably curious about the human condition. He also writes and lectures on the culture of museums (past and present) and on the contemporary relations between the arts and sciences. He is currently working on a new book about museums and public knowledge.

Francesca Happé is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. Her research centres on autism spectrum conditions. She has conducted research into the nature of social understanding in typical development, and ‘mind-reading’ impairments in autism. As well as cognitive methods, her research involves functional imaging studies, exploration of acquired brain lesions, and behaviour genetic methods. She has received the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal, the Experimental Psychology Society Prize and, most recently, the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award.

Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, and Academic Director of the London Consortium. He is the author of books on ventriloquism, the skin, the imagination of air and the philosophy of sport, as well as Paraphernalia: The curious lives of magical things (2011).

Vincent Walsh is Professor of Human Brain Research and a Royal Society Industry Research Fellow. He is an expert in sensory and cognitive neuroscience who applies his skills widely in the arts, industry and sports environments: “Passing tests in the lab is easy. Doing something that passes tests in the real world is much harder,” he says. His current research interests include sleep, creativity, tinnitus and new methods of human brain stimulation.

Penny Francis is an actor, writer, editor, researcher and activist on behalf of puppetry. She co-founded the development agency Puppet Centre Trust; having been its fundraiser and manager, she is now a Board member. She edited Animations magazine, 1976–90, and produced two international festivals in London, in 1979 and 1984. At the Central School of Speech and Drama, she has been lecturer in puppetry and theatre since 1992 and an Honorary Fellow since 2008. She is author of Puppetry: A reader in theatre practice (2012) and holds an MBE for services to puppetry.