Steve Dixon

Stephen Robert Dixon (born 1956 in Manchester, England) is a British actor and academic.

He studied performing arts at the Victoria University of Manchester, graduating in the same class as Rik Mayall.

He worked as an actor for many years, taking minor roles in films like Privates on Parade and on television shows including The Young Ones and The Krypton Factor.

For three years in the early 1980s he began working as a stand-up comic at The Comedy Store in London.

He also worked in theatre, most notably with directors such as Nicholas Hytner, Steven Berkoff and Richard Eyre as well as working with experimental theatre companies Incubus and Lumiere & Son.

He has directed productions himself in Mexico, Latvia and the UK, and produced an opera for the theatre company Opera North.

Dixon has also directed five independent films which include large-scale movies produced through community texts.

He also won an Industrial Society directing award for corporate video.

He has also been the Director of Training for Glasgow Film and Video Workshop.

Dixon has directed television programmes for Anglia and Granada Television, where he also produced an arts series.

In 1984 Dixon appeared on Coronation Street as a taxi driver escorting the long serving character Elsie Tanner out of Weatherfield after 24 years on the show and 45 years on the street.

He turned to lecturing during the 1990s, and has since become a noted academic in the field of performing arts.

Steve Dixon is a noted academic in the field of performing arts, in the 1990s he started lecturing at the University of Salford.

Between 1991 and 2005 he was the Associate Head (Teaching and Learning) of the School of Media, Music and Performance at the University of Salford.

In 1992 he co-founded the first honours degree combining media and performance.

And then in 1994 he created the first UK module for Stand-up comedy, one of the former students of the course being Peter Kay.

Dixon also created the theatre company 'The Chameleons Group' in 1994, in which he was the director.

They aimed to explore new ways to create multimedia performances and produced four performances whilst Steve Dixon was at the University of Salford.

The four performances 'The Chameleon Group' produced were: ‘Chameleons: The Dark Perversity’ in 1994, ‘Chameleons 2: theatre in a movie screen’ in 1999, ‘Chameleons3: Net Congestion’ in 2000 and ‘Chameleons 4: The Doors of Serenity’ in 2002.

All of their performances where part of Steve Dixon's practice-as-research.

One in 1996 called 'Chameleons: theatrical experiments in style, genre and multi-media’ and another in 1999 called ‘Chameleons 2: theatre in a movie screen’.

Between the Years 1999 and 2000 Dixon began working on, and became the co-director of the Digital Performance Archive.

Whilst at the University of Salford he published several articles which address a range of subjects including performance studies, gender, virtual theatre, pedagogy and cybertheory in leading journals such as The Drama Review (TDR), CTHEORY and Digital Creativity.

Dixon also published two CD-ROMs which document and analyse the work of his multimedia theatre company, The Chameleons Group.

In 2004 Steve Dixon's co-authored book with Barry Smith ‘Digital Performance: New Technologies in Theatre, Dance and Performance Art’ was published by the MIT press.

In 2005 Steve Dixon left the University of Salford to become the Head of the School of Arts at the University of Brunel.

Dixon led strategic and curriculum developments in the School of Arts at Brunel that led to the establishment of four research centres and the development of 11 new Masters Courses as well as the creation of new subject areas such as, Journalism and Videogames Design.

His work as the Head of School of Arts also led to the recruitment of world-leading Professors, such as Fay Weldon and Stelarc.

Dixon also managed to start the development of the new £3M Performance and Media centre at the University of Brunel.

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Dixon later became the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for development at the University of Brunel.

As the Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Steve's portfolio included knowledge transfer and enterprise development, corporate relationship management, sponsorship and fundraising, PR and profile raising, special projects and international collaborations.

Steve Dixon's other achievements whilst at the University of Brunel included producing his 800-page book Digital Performance, which has won two international awards.

Publishing more works on subjects including theatre studies, film theory, digital arts, Artificial Intelligence, and pedagogy.

Co-founding and becoming Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, he is also currently on the editorial board for the academic journals CTheory, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Body, Space & Technology.

Steve has also been invited many times to present seminars at many different Universities' including Paris Sorbonne, Trinity, Beijing Film Academy, Kansas, Bayreuth, Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol.

Dixon has also delivered keynote conference addresses in the US, Australia, Korea and the UK.

Originally working at the University of Salford, he has since moved to Brunel University in London, where he was head of the School of Arts, and later from 2008 one of the university's Pro-Vice-Chancellors.

One of his main publications is the book on Digital Performance published by MIT Press.

Since February 2012, Dixon has been the president of Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore.