Liselle Terrett
Associate Professor in Performance
"Liselle's performance-work is grotesque, powerful, political. Her performances are detailed, delicate, filthy, dirty, shameful, all too personal and at the same time - glorious. " (Simon Casson, Founder of Duckie). Most recently, in July 2024, Liselle was invited to be an artistic mentor, presenter and access consultant for the international Artist Summer Residency at The Cut, Halesworth, alongside Eddie Peake, Elsa James and Harold Offeh. Liselle is a co-founder of Not Your Circus Dog Collective (2018), & co-writer & director of Not F**kin' Sorry! ('‘shameless sexy punk crip cabaret"), 4 & 5 star touring theatre production ( incl. Soho Theatre & Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London), co-produced by The Hale & Access All Areas. (2019-2025). Liselle also presents and publishes on Re-staging Disability as well as documenting her practice as archival websites. In 2022, she was awarded the BAC's Foyle Foundation Commission where she created and performed Chatterbox on being ADHD. Chatterbox is returning in 2025. From 2005 to 2019, Liselle performed nationally and internationally as solo feminist crip performance artist, Doris La Trine, and in 2018 was invited to curate and host Wickedly Wild Women Cabaret for Jude Kelly's Women of the World at Southbank Centre, and Royal Court Theatre's Take-Up Space Cabaret. She has also proudly performed with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens at The Chelsea Theatre. Liselle's performance practice is often conducted collaboratively with disabled and neuro-divergent artists, co-constructing radical and political questions about continued exclusion and discriminatory assumptions around binaries of 'ability/disability'. Her artistic devising-processes position the ethics of care and collaboration as central, bringing the lived experience of learning disabled and autistic artists to the centre for emancipatory self-representation. As a teacher and academic, Liselle works with BA, MA and PhD students at the University of East London specifically looking at socially-engaged performance practices, contemporary performance making-processes, ethics and politics of making performance for and with specific audiences and communities often in the margins. Liselle was a lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech & Drama for ten years where she co- founded with Access All Areas, the award winning Diploma in Performance Making for adults with Learning Disabilities & Autism. Liselle was also Senior Lecturer at Coventry University, and continues to work on NYU's Summer Abroad Programme. She began as a drama teacher, before gaining a position as Senior Education Officer at Half Moon Young People's Theatre and the Unicorn Theatre, London.