Amaia Mugica
Senior Lecturer (Movement)
Amaia Mugica is a director, movement director, somatic movement educator, and performer working across devised and text-based theatre, as well as moving image/documentary. Her interdisciplinary practice centres on embodied performance, combining physical and somatic approaches to support expressive, collaborative, and inclusive creative processes.
She has training in Stanislavski, Suzuki, Viewpoints and composition, Butoh, Animal Flow and Laban Movement Analysis, and is a certified Somatic Movement Educator in the Body-Mind Centering® approach. In addition, she has trained with a range of international practitioners and companies, including Punchdrunk, Zen Zen Zo, Clod Ensemble, John Britton, David Glass and Rick Kemp to name a few.
Amaia’s academic background includes studies in Acting, Performing Arts Technology and Dance Movement Therapy, alongside an MA in Movement: Directing and Teaching from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
She is a director who has created both, text-based plays and devised theatre, working with musical theatre actors, actor-musicians, and interdisciplinary performers. Her latest devised work has received Arts Council England funding, toured internationally, and won two awards. In addition to theatre, she creates work in film and documentary, using moving image to deepen the exploration of embodied storytelling.
Currently, she is pursuing a Professional Doctorate, focusing her research on women in physical theatre and somatic actor training methodologies. Some of her further research interests include the embodiment of languages and accents, and the horror genre in theatre.
Amaia’s work has been showcased in various settings, including artistic organisations, educational institutions, and community-based projects such as Contact Manchester, Omnibus Theatre, Camden Peoples Theatre, Streatham Space Project, MMU, Guildhall, All In Actors, The Cockpit Theatre, London College of Music, Arcola Theatre, RCSSD, IDSA, ALRA, WAC, and Hackney Shed, among others.
She has worked internationally in countries such as Spain, the UK, Australia, Mexico, Germany, and the USA, to name a few.
Amaia has presented her work at various conferences:
2025 Gothic Crossroads (Manchester, UK). Presentation: Horror and the body in Theatre.
2025 IFTR, International Federation of Theatre Research (Cologne, Germany). Presentation:Horror and the body in Theatre.
2025 SPA Malta University (Valletta, Malta). Presentation: Forced migration, audible minorities, and international actors navigating identities in UK Performing Arts.
2024, Practice Research Conference UEL (London, UK). Video presentation: Intersectionality in Artistic Research.
2024 Forced Migration and the Arts. Online presentation and sharing Talk by Civil Leicester. Directed by Ambrose Musiyiwa.
2024 Symposium "Cultural Action and The Performing Arts: Equitable Models of Economic Growth"
Case study presentation: Do not erase me from my own work! The invisibility of the female director.
2022 IFTR, International Federation of Theatre Research (Reykjavik, Iceland).
Presentation: Shifting Physical Theatre techniques through female somas.
2022 BMCA Denison, Ohio. Presentation: Embodied somatic movement in devised Theatre-Making.