Dr Adelle Hulsmeier

I teach modules for BA (Hons) Performing Arts and BA (Hons) Screen Performance including:

• Screen Showcase
• Film for Social Change
• Multi-Platform

Since 2015, I actively strengthened partnership collaborations, shaping and managing a partnership between the University and Live Theatre, Newcastle. This coincided with the planning and delivery of a range of modules within Performing Arts, (Approaches to Creative Practice, Screen Showcase, Creative Enterprise Project, Final Showcase). The partnership aimed to; afford relationships with theatre members and increase their capacity and capability in delivering module content to the students, provide the student body with networking opportunities with a range of professionals working in the industry, and give the students access to the operational workings of a contemporary, professional theatre and its programme. The partnership offered a more vocational focus to student learning, and encounters were aimed at offering confidence and identifying pathways into the creative industries.

Since 2013, I have introduced and continue to manage the collaborative relationship with Northumbria Police, affording drama and film production students, particularly those taking the module TV Drama Projects, the opportunity to produce and act in films that increase awareness of complex category serious crime.

• Shakespeare
• Applied theatre
• Performance
• Screen performance
• Drama education
• Theatre for social change
• Enterprise and entrepreneurship on the curriculum

Active research projects:

XR Media and Police Education Co-Design Project: UKRI AHRC Curiosity Award
(March 2025–September 2026)

Through an already established partnership between the University and Northumbria Police, we expand our pool of specialists in police education and undertake fundamental research activity between XR specialists and police and partners.

An innovative research project that explores the police sector's need for more developed XR resources to be tailored to police education delivery. This synergistically impacts the development of teaching methodologies currently used to teach police education in the digital age, moving away from traditional teaching to an immersive, digitally driven classroom. We aim to explore whether XR specialists can create immersive teaching resources that support and improve police training methodologies.

This research investigates how extended reality (XR) technologies, such as virtual reality, can be purposefully integrated into UK police education and training. Its aim is to understand current national practice, identify pedagogical and operational needs, and inform the design of an evidence-based digital testing phase.

As of 2022, around one-third of UK police forces were trialling XR for training, yet provision is uneven, often undocumented, and shaped by local priorities. To address this gap, the project synthesises data from steering groups involving university educators, police trainers, operational officers, policymakers, and partner organisations.

Initial findings show XR is valued particularly in complex, sensitive, or high-risk scenarios such as domestic abuse, safeguarding, interviews, and officer-safety training. Across groups, XR is recognised as an effective tool for experiential learning, empathy-building, and standardisation. Across consultations, participants highlighted the importance of authenticity, diversity, and co-produced content, especially with lived-experience communities. Early findings indicate that XR’s value lies in structured, facilitated, ethically informed scenarios that complement, rather than replace, existing training, shaping a clear direction for the upcoming digital testing phase of the research to commence in January 2026.

The project aims to deliver three interconnected strands of research output:

1. A national scoping strand which has produced a detailed overview of current XR use in UK police education and training, identifying pedagogical needs, operational challenges, and capability gaps.

2. A developmental strand focuses on co-designed digital testing, including the formation of digital testing and evaluation groups with police and educational partners, and the creation of a proof-of-concept bid to advance XR testing into a scalable training tool.

3. A pedagogical and design framework establishing evidence-led principles for integrating XR into police learning, emphasising authenticity, diversity, lived-experience input, and effective scenario facilitation; this strand will generate scholarly outputs, including journal articles on pedagogy, media, and policing, alongside dissemination at the EDULEARN Conference and a dedicated networking symposium at the University of Sunderland in July 2026.

Together, these strands provide a roadmap for future XR integration in police education, combining national insight, pedagogical innovation, and practical prototyping.

Local Theatres: Participation, Inclusion, Imagination (UKRI) 
(September 2024–November 2025)
Project Co-Lead, Sunderland (in collaboration with Royal Holloway University of London, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, The University of York)

Read more about the project here: https://localtheatres.wordpress.com/making-local-stories/making-stories-in-sunderland/

A major study of local theatres across the UK relative to where localism has re-entered the political lexicon. This research aims to transform the understanding of theatre-making as local, hyperlocal, and translocal practices.

Throughout 2024–2025, alongside Research Associate Dr Kay Hepplewhite, I mapped Sunderland’s local theatre landscape, producing a citywide overview of venues, companies, and participatory opportunities. This mapping formed a key output of the Local Theatres project, offering the first research-led snapshot of Sunderland’s theatre ecology and highlighting gaps, strengths, and opportunities for cultural growth.

Sunderland was used as a case study of a post-industrial city reshaping its identity through culture. The research examined how theatre contributes to belonging, local representation, and civic imagination, generating three main strands of outputs.

Strand One, Performing Localism: produced extensive observations and interviews around the National Theatre’s Public Record (2025), culminating in the report Public Record: Remembering, Representing, and Re-imagining the City. The project documented inclusive practice, community impact, and the performance’s contribution to Sunderland’s cultural ecology.

Strand Two, Making Local Stories: supported Theatre Space North East CIC to create Sunniside Stories (2025), resulting in a practice-based study and research report.

Strand Three, Theatres and Local Cultures generated the Mapping Local Theatres Podcast Series (2025) based on interviews with cultural leaders across Sunderland city, exploring workforce needs, cultural regeneration, and the future of Sunderland’s theatre ecology. A final workshop shared findings with local practitioners and informed recommendations for sustaining grassroots theatre. Read more about our event at: https://www.sunderland.ac.uk/more/news/university-news/2025/local-theatre-research-sunderland-university/

Our approaches to knowledge generation are designed to benefit theatre-makers as artists and theatres as organisations. Our findings inform policy agendas by clarifying the cultural politics of localism, and evidence the value of sustainable local theatres.

Embedding Employability on the Curriculum
(2020–to date)

In a joint research project with Hayley Jenkins, our project collates a 'live' exchange of enterprising innovations currently embedded in curricula across our faculty as a means of articulating good practice and enhancing the scope for more successful collaborative approaches to pedagogical practice and entrepreneurship education. Our project:

• Shares practical guidance to support colleagues in embedding enterprise within the curriculum
• Provides a platform to share good practice and navigate challenges in embedding enterprise in the curriculum
• Enhances embedded industrial practices, collaborations, and innovations.

Participatory Practice

Police Projects (Educational Partnership between The University of Sunderland, the Office for Police Crime Commissioner and Northumbria Police)

I manage the collaboration with the office for Police Crime Commissioner and Northumbria Police and sustain and nurture the partnership which affords performance and film production students the opportunity to produce films that increase awareness of complex category serious crime. Invaluable as a training resource for the police and invested partners from counselling services, law, healthcare, secondary, tertiary, and Higher Education*, these films are integrated into education and training. All collaborate with our Level 6 undergraduates. To date, over 50 films have been produced by approximately 1000+ students. All films have addressed key issues of serious crime including the capacity to consent, sexual exploitation, domestic violence, cyber-safety, modern-day slavery, male rape, county lines, policing during covid, and Peer on Peer abuse.

*Changing Lives, Sunderland Counsellors, Edge North East, SARC, Slater & Gordon, Association of Chief Police Officers, Healthcare Professionals (e.g. GPs, GUM services, University Wellbeing Departments, Accident and Emergency Departments), and Voluntary Organisations

Past research projects:

2023 National Theatre's Public Acts, in collaboration with Royal Holloway, University of London

Public Acts builds sustained partnerships with theatre and community organisations across the UK that share a vision of theatre as a force for change. In collaboration with Royal Holloway, I employed a research assistant to work closely with Sunderland Empire and the Fire Station, Sunderland. Collaboratively we created an end report that combined an analysis of both individual and community benefits, for participants of the City of Sunderland, around career opportunities through participation in theatre and the arts.

2022: Seascapes Co/Lab: funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund with Seascapes: Tyne to Tees Shores and Seas marine heritage project.  Blast Beach: Reading the Rocks(opens in new tab)

Principal Investigator, project manager, producer, and coordinator for Sea Air project: Reading the Rocks. This project was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This was a multi-media-based project based around and informed by interviews with communities who are living around and/or influenced by Blast Beach, Seaham. Over a six-month period, varying individuals were interviewed to create a documentary that highlights the influence of the coast upon the people who live and are influenced by it. Geologists, East Durham Artist's Network (EDAN), miners, and local community members will be interviewed about the coast and its meaning and influence on their work, practice, and everyday lives. This work was screened at EDAN's Maglime exhibition and again as part of Seaham Carnival.

Shakespeare and Applied Theatre

My research into Shakespeare within Applied Theatre settings explores the challenges faced when combining Shakespeare’s plays for purposes of transformation. It explores how applied theatre may embody strains between the instrumental and the transformative. It undertakes a historical reading of a range of Shakespeare’s works in order to demonstrate the importance of the cultural, political, and historical contexts of Shakespeare’s plays. It explores the intentions of applied theatre within three salient community settings (prison, disability, and therapy) exploring how Shakespeare’s work is used within these settings and why. All aspects are explored in order to demonstrate how the challenge of making Shakespeare’s plays work in an applied theatre setting is more complex than it may at first appear.

1. Shakespeare' Disabled, Disabled Shakespeare (2020) Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice: Bloomsbury Press, ISBN 9781350140387
2. Applied Shakespeare: A Transformative Encounter? (2023) Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, ISBN 978-3-031-45413-4

My research outputs are relevant to the areas of drama for social change, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, partnership and client-led curriculum design, XR Media and Police Education, and action-based research.

PhD Supervision:

2024-2026: Primary Supervisor Sarah Hamilton; 'Short-Form Media as Social Catalyst: Community-Controlled Participatory Content in Nonprofit Communication'

2025-2026: Secondary Supervisor John Reed; 'Re visioning the Institutional History: The New School 2.0'

I welcome new doctoral students working in the areas of Applied and Participatory Theatre, Shakespeare, Theatre in Education, Career-Focused Curriculum, and Creative Partnerships.

• Shakespeare
• Applied theatre
• Performance
• Screen performance
• Drama education
• Live theatre
• Theatre for social change
• Employability on the curriculum.

Professional memberships:

• Senior Fellow, Association of Higher Education
• DisCrim Network: Vulnerability and Criminal Justice Network
• DramaHE.

Awards:

• 2023 VCTF Award
• 2022 Aurora Programme
• 2020 National Teaching Fellowship Award (NTFS) Advanced HE
• 2019 Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) Advanced HE
• 2019 Senior Fellow of the Advanced HE (SFHEA).

In the media:

• ‘Reel justice’: a unique collaboration between university filmmakers and police(opens in new tab)
• Blog: Shining a spotlight on crime(opens in new tab)
• YouTube channel(opens in new tab) The Police Films.