Medicine’s Monstrous Daughters

Her stage work includes two seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and The Barbican, appearances in London’s West End including “The Mousetrap” and “Werewolves” and seasons with many repertory companies including Birmingham Rep, Stoke-on-Trent, Harrogate and The Globe Theatre Company in Warsaw in Poland.

As a television actor she has worked for most of the major TV companies and her appearances for BBC and ITV include “Red Dwarf”, “Wire In The Blood”, “Daziel and Pascoe” , “Doctors”, “Wild Things” and 2 seasons of the Carla Lane series “LUV”.

She enjoys audio work immensely and as well as voice-overs for commercials she has worked extensively in the field of animation. Her credits include the TV series “Watership Down”, “Save-Ums” and “Franny’s Feet”, and she has also recorded many plays for radio including the Charles Dickens serial “Our Mutual Friend” for BBC Radio 4.

Visual impairment has afflicted 5 members of her family and as a result Penelope has established a long association with the RNIB recording countless books for them and over 200 audiobooks for  commercial companies.

Her main passion however is live theatre and trying to ensure that it continues to thrive and be both accessible and affordable. Since the demise of the repertory system therefore, she has committed to working for and supporting vibrant companies such as Vital Xposure with whom she has a long association. In recent years she has collaborated and performed in their productions of The Knitting Circle, The Disappearance of Dorothy Lawrence, the award winning films Blue Pen and Voices From The Knitting Circle. She is delighted therefore to return once again to direct Medicine’s Monstrous Daughters.

Driven by social justice, Julie has a life-long preoccupation with disavowed voices on the political periphery. She is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, recently recipient of the Best Documentary Over 30 Minutes and Best of the Festival Award at Picture This… Film Festival, Calgary, Canada, 2018; Unlimited Award 2014; Southbank Show Diversity Award ITV 2010; ITV & DaDa Writers 2009; Peabody Award for documentary 2000. She has a substantial theatre production history both in the UK and on the international stage, and has published widely in poetry anthologies and non-fiction discourses on Disability and Mental Health. In January 2019, Julie has been awarded a Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow from the University of Melbourne, Victoria. Julie McNamara also directed The Butch Monologues which in Australia between January – March 2019, following its sell out tours across the UK in 2015 and 2017.

Ten: Poets of the New Generation. Her debut pamphlet poetry collection, If I talked everything my eyes saw, was shortlisted for the 2017 Michael Marks Award. Omkemi’s work is driven by lived experience and an interest in memory practices. Her first exploration of this theme was Nine Night, an immersive ritual theatre piece exploring ancestry which featured as part of The Yard Theatre’s NOW 15 festival. She has also collaborated with performance maker Rajni Shah to create Song for the 2016 What Remains performance art festival. Her work continues to explore memory, particularly somatic memories, how these are transferred across generations and the appearance of these processes in the field of mental health.

“… Moments of magical realisim… mesmerising musicality, offer us the possibility of divine redemption, which is of course poetry”, Pascale Petit