Rhiannon Armstrong

is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist making works with empathy, interaction, and dialogue at their core, often for unfiltered audiences. Conversation and collaboration are central to her practice: between makers of different disciplines, public contributors, and audiences.

Rhiannon is recipient of the Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance 2019 and Another Route International Fellow (2022-23).

an interdisciplinary performance artist

Rhiannon is driven by dialogue and context, and works across mediums to find the most suitable way to engage with a given setting. She brings the audience-focus of a theatre background to work that has included

  • intimate performance and audio works
  • large scale public interventions
  • collaborative theatre projects
  • interactive digital art 
  • music
  • textile

Rhiannon works in contexts ranging from town centres, galleries, prisons, theatres, management consultancies, museums, and online public space. 

with a growing digital practice.

Rhiannon is evolving a reputation for internet-situated work and innovative uses of digital mediums. She was awarded the inaugural commission for a web-based performance from The Space in 2015, and a Culture in Quarantine commission from the BBC in 2020 for The Soothing Presence of Strangers (broadcast on Radio 3).

Rhiannon regularly presents on audience-focussed design and integrated access, with a specialism in publicly situated internet art works such as How to Hold, Behold and Be Held for Wellcome Collection in 2021. As associate artist of Coney Rhiannon led a Jerwood-funded training and commissioning process for interactive works using handheld technology in 2019.

Advocacy, mentoring and training informed by lived experience of disability

Rhiannon mentors artists through creative processes, and also privately supports individuals and organisations to look carefully at the way in which they work with others, helping the industry to become more sustainable by addressing access and inclusion issues, and exploitative working practices in the sector. Rhiannon was a founding member of the Artists Sounding Board at Battersea Arts Centre and served on it from 2015-2021.

Teaching and facilitation

Rhiannon regularly delivers presentations and workshops drawing on her artistic practice both nationally (at Central School of Speech and Drama) and internationally (at ARTEZ Netherlands), covering various areas including:

  • intimate performance practice
  • relational work in public space
  • art as intervention (in public space and online)
  • embedding access in the creative process
  • immersive and interactive theatre
  • digital media in performance practice
  • autobiographical art
  • experimental museological practice

Research

Rhiannon was research and curatorial assistant to Professor Adrian Heathfield (2009-2012), Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Roehampton University as part of the three year AHRC-funded project Performance Matters. She often employs a research-led process in her collaborative works across disciplines, such as:

  • the two large-scale exhibitions in Museums and Heritage settings: INK (UCL Museums and Collections, 2010) and BONE (Florence Nightingale Museum, 2012) co-curated with Simon Gould
  • impact-led creative partnerships with academics such as Dr Sarah Fine (senior lecturer in philosophy at King’s College London), Dame Professor Henrietta Moore (director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at UCL and chair of Culture, Philosophy and Design) 
  • in dramaturgical support for fellow artists and theatre makers including Oily Cart, Coney, Nicole Elocin, J. Fergus Evans, and Rachel Mars
  • research reports and recommendations for arts trusts and foundations such as How The Light Gets in Festival and The SHM Foundation

Download CV