Debbie Anzalone

Debbie's research explores the relationship between film, storytelling, listening and embodied experience. She is interested in how we experience stories and ideas beyond the visual, and how sound, movement and participation can offer different ways of communicating and making meaning.

Her current research centres on listening as both a sensory and social practice with an interest in its relationship to communication, connection and wellbeing. She is interested in how these approaches can change the creative process itself, and how listening and embodied methods might create more dialogic ways of thinking, making and collaborating.

Collaboration is an important part of this research, bringing her into dialogue with practitioners working across sound, design, music, technology and the arts.

Her current project, The Listening Body, developed with percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, brings together Evelyn's story and lived experience of listening with sound and spatial installation. The work explores how we listen through the body, and how listening can shape the ways we communicate, connect and experience the world around us.

Debbie has worked as a filmmaker and creative practitioner for more than twenty years, developing documentaries, social impact campaigns and cultural commissions. Narrative and storytelling have been central to this work, particularly in projects addressing complex social issues.

A significant part of her practice has explored subjects including mental health, identity and social change. Her work in this area has included commissions for the Home Office, Samaritans, Mind and Time to Change, alongside projects for broadcasters and cultural organisations including the BBC, Channel 4, Sky Arts and Tate.

Her approach is often collaborative, with conversation, listening and lived experience informing the creative process. More recently, she has been extending her work with narrative and communication into sound, installation and embodied forms of experience, collaborating with artists, musicians, designers and researchers across disciplines.

Grand Prix Winner, The Drum Awards -Time to Change campaign for Mind

Kinsale Shark Award - It Doesn't Have to Happen campaign for the Home Office / COI

Campaign Magazine - Pick of the Week

Shots Magazine - Pick of the Week

• Selected creative collaborations: Dame Evelyn Glennie, Michael Nyman, William Forsythe, Nick Ryan and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt   BSC. 
• Broadcasters and cultural organisations: BBC, Channel 4, Sky Arts, Tate, Sadler’s Wells, The Royal Ballet and Deutsche Grammophon. 
• Selected Production companies: Ridley Scott Associates and Partizan Films.
• Selected screenings: Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, Pompidou, Paris and the Barbican, London.