Jools Gilson is an artist, writer and educator. She directed the dance theatre company half/angel from 1995 to 2006, and since 2010 has made creative radio for RTÉ and the BBC. Her texts, choreography and installation have been performed and exhibited internationally, and have received awards from The Arts Councils of Ireland and England, Culture Ireland, The Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), ResCen (Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts, UK) and others. She holds a practice-based PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Surrey, and taught performance at the University of Hull and Dartington College of Arts (UK) before coming to Ireland. Jools is also an award-winning radio broadcaster. Her radio documentary Los Preciosos (RTÉ Radio 1), received the Gold Award for Best Narration at the 2011 New York Festivals, and has been broadcast by CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) in 2012 and by ABC National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) in 2013. Her feature Oisin’s Story (also for RTÉ Radio 1) was nominated for the GlaxoSmithKline Irish Medical Media Awards in 2012. Her creative documentary Chrysanthemum was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in April 2014, and selected for Pick of the Week, and then Pick of the Year, broadcast on Christmas Day 2014. Her radio drama Spinstren, also broadcast in 2014, was the first binaural (3D stereo sound) drama produced by RTÉ Radio in 30 years. The Rain Box (2017) for Lyric FM, made in collaboration with composer Sebastian Adams, was nominated for a New York Festivals Award for Sound Art in 2018. She taught in the School of English at UCC from 1996 – 2016, where she was Associate Director of the MA in Creative Writing from 2013. She was appointed Profe

Jools Gilson's research interests cross boundaries between traditional academic scholarship and arts / broadcast practice. She has been a professional choreographer, an installation artist, a broadcaster, a critic and always a writer. She was the Director of the performance production company half/angel for more than 10 years, during which time she collaborated with the composer / digital artist Richard Povall to make dance theatre and installation works known for their poetic sensibility and digital innovation. More recently, Jools has developed documentary and drama work in broadcast radio. The sensibility of her work continues to focus on making provocative & haunting poetic spaces across difference forms of practice. Alongside this, she publishes in the fields of Feminist Theory, Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality, Performance Studies, Performative Writing, Somatics and Affect Studies.

Jools Gilson teaches theatre practice, choreography, somatics, voice, writing for and out of performance, creative radio and transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary performance. She has a particular interest in hybrid forms of creative practice which combine elements of dance, theatre, sound, visual art, installation, film & video, and teaches practical and theoretical explorations of discipline and meaning-making in performance. She is the co-ordinator of the PhD in Creative Practice, and has particular theoretical interests in Feminist Theory, Gender & Sexuality, Performative Writing, Performance Studies, Affect Studies, Somatics and Creative Writing. She supervises PhDs in these areas.