About

Joanna Pidcock is a London-based Australian theatre director, dramaturg, and librettist. Her portfolio of directing work spans text-based theatre, devised, immersive, and site-specific productions, with independent companies in Melbourne, Paris and London. As a dramaturg, Joanna has been involved in the development of a new work with Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch for the Schaubühne, and has adapted two novellas into opera libretti, one of which is under development at the Royal Opera House. As an associate, assistant, or intern director, Joanna has worked on large-scale professional productions at the Bouffes du Nord, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Hampstead Theatre, and the National Theatre Studio, and has extensive experience with new work. Joanna makes work that interrogates conflict and change - personal, structural, societal, emotional, and cultural. She is interested in work that communicates a strong sense of place, as well as adaptations of non-theatrical texts.

Joanna has been longlisted for the Genesis Future Directors Award at the Young Vic Theatre. In July 2019, she was the British Council representative artist at the prestigious Séminaire en Avignon residency, as part of the Festival d’Avignon. Joanna has been awarded a Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa, allowing her to continue her career in the UK.

As a writer of literary non-fiction, Joanna was shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and is represented by Anna Webber at United Agents.

Joanna has a first-class BA from the University of Melbourne with majors in English and Theatre Studies and Creative Writing, a Diploma of Languages in French, and in 2016 completed a first-class Honours thesis in English and Theatre Studies, developing research methodologies surrounding audience response and the theatrical event.