Peter Wynne-Willson

Educated at King Edwards School Birmingham and Manchester University, Peter has worked in Applied Theatre for more than thirty years, first as founding Artistic Director of Big Brum Theatre-in-Education Company, [1982-1992] and then as a freelance theatre writer, actor and director. He has written 43 professionally produced plays, mostly for young audiences, for companies including Birmingham Rep [Looking for Yoghurt, Princess and Ginger, Nativity, The Shooky], MAC [The Last Shot], Big Brum [Roy, Heads or Tails, Homeland, Drowning] Women and Theatre [Risky Business, Talking Balls, Moby Duck [The Dream Eater, The Frog that Wouldn’t Hop, Bong Soon, The Kam Tree, Once Upon a Tiger, Tiger Trail, Iagi Boddari] Greenwich YPT [The Broken Peace], Language Alive [Saving Hope and Nori] Gazebo [The Cut] and Hanyong Theatre Company.[The Bridge]

Beyond his work as a writer he has directed more than fifty original plays and projects, and performed in many more, as well as leading devising companies across a wide range of projects. He directed the first ever workshop production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, at the University of Birmingham in 1993 – where she was doing her MA in Playwriting. In 2015 he directed a specially gathered company of actors from six countries in creating a multi-lingual piece called Walking Shadow, for Kijimuna festival, Okinawa.

He was a founding member of the Theatre in Health Trust, and Birmingham Education Arts Forum, and one of the Key artists in the seminal early years arts project How to Catch a Moonbeam. He was nominated for the prestigious Creative Britons award in 1998,received an Arts Council Writers Bursary in 1997, and the Sacred Earth Drama Award in 1998 for 'El Mono' a children's musical about the animals of the Andes. He also won the Top Gun Award for Most Creative Practitioner in the Black Country in 2010.

Among other major freelance commitments he has had spells as:

• Drama Animateur for C&T Worcester [2013-15] 
• Education Manager at Birmingham Hippodrome/Cameron Mackintosh [1996-2000], 
• Early Years Development Worker at Birmingham Rep [2006-9] Community Participation Manager at Birmingham Opera Company 1999-2002

His other clients for major projects as consultant, co-ordinator, facilitator or similar include: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, BrightSpace, Libra Theatre, East London Metropolitan Opera, City of Birmingham Touring Opera, St Matthews, Perry Beeches, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Cameron Mackintosh, Puppetlink, West Midlands Puppet Forum, Shropshire Youth Arts Network, Bright Space, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Walsall Community Arts, BEAF, Hanyong Theatre Company.

His connection with South Korea began in 1999 when he established an MFA module at the Korean National University of the Arts in Seoul during the first of three semester-long spells as Visiting Professor of Young People’s Theatre. Arising from this link have been a series of international co-productions, starting with The Bridge in 2005, which was revived in 2008 for the World congress of Theatre for Young Audiences in Adelaide. Looking for Yoghurt, which was co-produced with Birmingham Rep, was toured to Korean Japan and the UK in 2013.