Rachel is a UK based theatre director and creative producer. She trained at Ecole Jacques LeCoq in Paris and has worked across Britain and mainland Europe as an actor, director, workshop leader, creative consultant, project manager and producer.

Nowadays she is based in Bristol and is the artistic director of PECo theatre who make imaginative, theatrically driven experiences for the widest possible audiences, connecting people and place with the power of the imagination.

The work aims to transform, celebrate, re-imagine and investigate, start conversations, spark new connections and place participants and audiences at the heart of all these experiences in immersive and meaningful ways.

For the past 8 years or so Rachel has been exploring co-creative participatory processes with a focus on socially engaged issues often with marginalised communities, bringing diverse project collaborators together in non-hierarchical shared processes of creation.

Increasingly the underlying aims are how to design enriching processes and experiences that generate connection, empathy and joy to catalyse transformations in wellbeing, shifts in perception and understanding and a deeper sense of belonging and place.

A recent example of this approach is PECo’s City of Threads a 12 part immersive podcast series that invites the listener on immersive journeys into the city of Bristol as experienced through the perspectives of its visually impaired citizens; a place of sensory delights, navigational intricacies, challenges, dangers and shared discoveries. Developed through a 14 month co-creative inclusive process working with a large multi-disciplinary team of visually impaired and sighted artists and collaborators, it challenges assumptions, reveals new understandings and ultimately asks us to reimagine how our cities are working for us all.

Before founding PECo, Rachel co-founded Cambridge based new writing theatre company Menagerie for whom she acted, directed, dramaturged, ran workshops and development programmes and helped establish their annual new writing theatre festival Hotbed. She also directed award winning one man play Bloominauschwitz for them.