Bambo Soyinka
Bambo Soyinka is an award winning writer, director and curator. She is a Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking and Creative Media within the Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education.
Bambo’s research interests include story migration, pervasive storytelling and multiplatform directing. Her work currently explores the performance of deception in folklore, mythology and networked culture.
Bambo’s most recent project, Translating Tales of the Trickster, funded by the AHRC, is a network and development project exploring the Trickster, an enduring character from folklore who is never quite what we at first think and still appears today in different guises across the world. The Trickster network will consider the ways in which trickster folklore is being translated into new forms of fiction and will explore how trickster narratives are lived and performed in every day life, as evidenced in material gathered from autobiographies, personal testimonies and network interactions.
Bambo is also conducting exploratory research into the processes of directing multi-platform performance. Supported through the DCRC and a UWE Early Careers grant, “Directing Multiplatform Performance” is a preliminary investigation of the ways in which directing processes are being transformed as platforms for storytelling expand across theatre, cinema, digital networks and real locations. The research involves an auto-ethnography of her work as director/writer for Dial 419 for Love (Wales Lab) and as an emerging director of Branches (National Theatre Wales).
Bambo has over a decade’s experience of multi-platform storytelling and production, having initiated and directed projects across the UK and internationally. She has worked with leading national and international organisations, including the National Theatre Wales, the BBC, Channel 4, the Berlinale, the Arts Council of England, the Arts Council of Wales, the British Council, the AHRC and the ESRC.
Bambo began her research career working as an ethnographer at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences on the EHRC project “Digital Ethnography”. Her multi-platform production career began with Victoria Real, an interactive media company (now part of Endemol), leading a team of six people designing multimedia content for the BBC and Channel 4 and working on the first ever Big Brother series.
