Maria Leonard | Teaching

Workshops, Seminars & Public Learning

I create and facilitate workshops, education-activism groups and writing groups. I'm passionate about open classrooms and co-learning - it is a space for change, invention and spontaneous shifts. I've been employed by cultural institutions, Festivals, academic institutions, adult learning institutions, youth spaces and more to deliver group learning, as well as to curate learning programmes. A selection is below.

Course Leader, Bishopsgate Institute London: Art, Sex, Politics: Resistance in the Rebel Dykes Archive

This course brings together the queer histories of 1980s London working class dyke culture to life with a focus on the strategies of resistance - from pleasure, art and direct action - used by queer artists, community organisers and activists.

Using the Rebel Dykes Archive at Bishopsgate Institute as a starting point, we will explore the themes underpinning the group. The underground radical scene was a place for learning, organising and making. From art, sex, and politics, we will go through radical writing, artistic interventions, and methods for social organising to connect the strategies of resistance underpinning all of these.

The Bishopsgate Institute’s Special Collections and Archives holds one of the most extensive collections on LGBTQ+ history, politics and culture in the UK. It covers the late nineteenth century onward.

More information on the sold out programme here.

You will learn:

To interact with sources and contemporary materials to see how DIY approaches to art, politics and everyday life have been transformative and impactful
How queer cultural history interacts with wider political histories from the 1980s to the present day
How to use these as a guide to create your own art, responses and organising
The empowering stories of queer lives and subcultures that are now forgotten, including the unapologetic Rebel Dykes

Visiting lecturer, University of the Arts Berlin: Persistent Difficulty

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Lecture series and seminar group over 2 semesters for first year undergraduates focused on "freedom", writing and political structures. Contract continues to 2026 :) More information on the public series based on this.

Persistent Difficulty is a reading and lecture series by Maria Leonard that focuses on the relationship between philosophy, aesthetics, and politics.

The first in the series focuses on language, possibility and autonomy. By establishing the relationship between resistance and imagination, life as it is lived and emancipatory futures, language as it is written and then embodied, Persistent Difficulty: Language, Possibility and Autonomy brings the large question of the relationship between philosophy, art and politics into the broader context.

Both art and critical theory have a specific ability to confront, or criticise and re-shape existing conditions of of un-freedom. But does the language of aesthetics, philosophy and theory still open up perspectives on using imagination in a way that is not limited to normative modes of thinking, doing and becoming? Is freedom fully subjective or objective?

Part-lecture, part-performance, part-reading series, the first in the Persistent Difficulty series is commissioned and hosted by Berlin University of the Arts. It aims to overturn what a traditional lecture looks and feels like in front of and with the public. The series looks at how the lecture has been used to dominate, as well as a space to practice freedom.

Writers covered include: James Baldwin, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Bertolt Brecht, Saidiya Hartman, Angela Y. Davis, D. Winnicot, Lola Olufemi

Common and Uncommon Futures for for UCL Object-Based Learning Lab / UCL Anthropocene funded by Being Human Festival, School of Advanced Study University of London

What kind of knowledge, systems and capabilities do we need to imagine and build alternative futures?

In ‘Common and Uncommon Futures’, an Invented Futures Lab produced for the Being Human Festival 2022, we will go through a series of extracts, writing prompts, provocations to ask key questions:

What is a common future?
How does the Anthropocene unite geological and local futures?

We will place objects, texts and our own opinions alongside each other in a way that creates a generative, archival, imaginative space, going after Anna Tsing’s call “to look around rather than ahead”.

We will be guided by a wide range of sources, prompts and tools for thinking, taking inspiration from essayists and storytellers like Sylvia Wynter, Matthew Escobar, Zora Neale Hurston and Ursula Le Guin.

Whether you are interested in a geological understanding of the Anthropocene, want to question the political beginnings of building futures, consider the impending climate apocalypse, or the wayward thread that pulls them all together, this is a workshop where we can speculate and imagine together. Whatever your starting point of knowledge.

What is the Anthropocene? More information about the Lab here.

New Experiments, Invented Futures Interactive Workshop: York Festival of Ideas 2022 and Imagine! Festival of Ideas and Politics Belfast 2022

Commissioned during Imagine! Festival of Ideas and Politics, as well as York Festival of Ideas.

Join writer and producer Maria Leonard for an interactive workshop using co-creation, creative writing and shared discussion on the plural trajectories for care, work and technology.

Through the course of the evening, we will look at the relationship between climate justice and other forms of ‘futures literacy’, or ways of better understanding the role the future plays in what we see and do, such as pluriversal politics, acts of imagination and future forms of governance.

Building on the research produced by the Invented Futures collective, the session will introduce the concepts of worlding and the commons, organising practices, emerging debates around living with technology and the urgent questions around living together.

By centering the potential of imagination and the notion of ‘plural futures’, we will challenge, question and develop participants’ notion of what makes a future, the kinds of people-led organising it takes to meet the demands of current future trajectories, and the imaginative responses that we need going forward.

“Reinvention is possible. Building is possible. What tools have we to build with except hammers, nails, saws - education, learning to think, learning skills? Are there tools that have not yet been invented?” Ursula K. Le Guin

Spike Island

Working with artists and designers both online and in the Associates studio space, I teach 1.5 hour workshops on affect theory, queer theory and the application of these in co-creation practices, such as audio, film and written work. We look at examples from diverse artists/writers such Elizabeth Grosz, José Esteban Muñoz and Sara Ahmed, and then share work and questions.

School of Activism 2.0

In collaboration with the team at the People's Republic of Stokes Croft, Bristol space, I curated a programme of events/workshops on rebel history and reclamation, tools for transformation and active citizenship. Alongside workshops, I devised and facilitated a discussion on 'utopian acts' with researchers Dr Katie Stone and Dr Zoetanya Sujon.

Framework Co-working

A 2 hour in-depth writing workshop that asked questions of the politics and ethics of 'making worlds', and introduced new perspectives on the uses of 'speculative' fiction, film and political writing. All in the workshop shared work, co-taught and asked big questions!

The Yard Theatre, Hub67

A writing workshop structured around different "speculative acts". Uncovering the ways that artistic practice can be used as the basis for organising, I taught a workshop at Hub67 for the local community using co-learning methods and interactive Q+A on writing to inspire, change and imagine otherwise.

East Street Arts

An online workshop introducing members to artistic practices, responses and political writings from various artists and poets living with mental illness and disability. In the second half of the workshop participants engaged with resources to write their own artistic manifesto (in many forms) and ideas around self-advocacy.

The Reading Agency

I ran a workshop for a group of young people at Westminster Library as part of The Reading Agency aimed at changing perceptions and reducing hesitation around reading. Using structured questions as well as "free" time to share opinions on what the young people had read in safe listening space.

Tech For Good/Women's Aid

With the team I collaborated on a bespoke workshop for designers and non profits in ideation around solutions to gender-based violence, bias tech practices and co-producing design solutions with survivors.

Worker Voice and Empowerment

I helped curate a panel discussion and series of talks focused on the decline in worker voice and empowerment. With the gig economy growing and younger generational understanding of trade unions becoming evermore misconstrued, trade union membership and support has fallen to an all time low.

Tech For Good/National Gallery

With the team I collaborated on a facilitated session on the ways delivering arts and heritage programmes online and through digital curation can lead to different aspects of engagement. This was a session for technologists, fundraisers, art workers and digital artists.

Strategies of Resistance series

I was commissioned by the Theatre Deli London to devise and teach a workshop series as part of their public engagement programme Theatre Deli Meets.

Workshops in the series
ANTICIPATION: Futures, Entanglement and Temporality

What is grief time? What is deep time? What is splicing? All of these can be used in your creative practice to unearth inconsistencies, contradictions and playful alternatives to linear narratives. From speculative fiction to film, from performance to monologues, we will look at the strategies used by Brecht, Ursula Le Guin, RashDash and more.
You will be introduced to different methods for disrupting the narrative function of temporal signs, create alternatives through interactive co-creation. We will touch on elements of non-linear narrative, the role of time in narrative, temporal subversions in performance, and notions of playing with ‘the future’ in your work.
This is an introductory workshop, so if you haven’t written before there will be plenty of materials, exercises and discussion points to make use of for starting your own practice across many mediums.

Google Doc materials can be accessed here.

Wild Things: Interruption, Noise and Chaos

Join in the Wild Things workshop to develop your creative practice, or to get you unstuck, through embracing interruption and inarticulacy, chaos and noise, interruption and repetition.
We will look at subversive artistic approaches and acts used in performance art, theatre, film and poetry to produce your own creative tactics. The aim is to disrupt the linear narrative strategies that might be making it hard for you to start a project, finish a play, or figure out the next step.
Embracing refusal, narrative drift, noise, chaos and glitchiness, the workshop will get you thinking about these acts as creating ‘resistance’ to universal narratives and unconscious structural routines that appear in everyday life in order to create cracks at the level of meaning, and to open up new realities.
This workshop will encourage you to think about what Jack Halberstam calls: “Wildness - a provocation, a retreat from the conventional, an affront to the normal and the expected, and an environmental condition.” (Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire)
Outcomes:
You will be introduced to polyvocal methods across sound, meaning and language.
You will be given space to develop a unique ‘strategy of disclosure’ through messy play, automatic writing, collage techniques and more. You will share your process with the group and find connections between each of your scratch pieces of work.
This workshop is particularly geared towards young people starting to think about their creative practice.

Google Docs materials can be accessed here.

Redefining Resistance: Pleasure, Ritual and Memory

Writing to resist comes in many different forms. Not just manifesto writing, but strategies of pleasure, ritual and memory are ways your creative practice can resist, question and provoke dialogue.
We will look at alternative practices of resistance from diverse experiences, such as migratory experiences, alternative forms of memory-making, notions of pleasure, as well as forms of ritual based on cultural memory, in order to look at how to create narratives that resist.
We will then experiment with all of these redefinitions of resistance and map them against examples from scripts, performance art and writings from artists such as Adrienne Maree Brown, Stuart Hall, Bryony Kimmings, RashDash and Tania Bruguera.
This workshop will take you through experimental methods, shared discussion, reading texts and writing exercises. Everyone will have the chance to share their scratch work.

Google Docs materials can be accessed here.

Queer Performance, Cruel Optimism: Feminist Snap and Possibility

“Queer” is an unreliable, contradictory, changing word: its definition has been reclaimed as an identity by those who it was supposed to hurt the most. The word has a contradictory quality.
The term “queer theory” is one that can put off those who want to engage with queerness, but are not always up to date with academia’s version of what it means to be queer. It’s an unreliable, contradictory body of thought that is dedicated to understanding how the complex phenomena of sexuality and gender are constituted in people, in writing, in gestures, in customs, policies, in thoughts and life.
This interactive workshop will get you playing with themes of queerness, identity and possibility in your drafts, as well as a space to meet other creatives using similar themes.
You will be taken through tools to write through a queer lens, or to use queer writing to form your own way of living in the world. Asking, what extensions, corrections, rejections, and forms of truth-telling does queer theory require? How can you develop a creative practice or community performance that embraces these questions and expands sexualities through creative practice and performance?
The writers and artists we will look at include: Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, Mae G. Henderson, Audre Lorde, José Esteban Muñoz, Gayle Rubin.