Prof. Anna Furse is Artistic Director of Athletes of the Heart and Co-Director of The Centre of the Body at Goldsmiths where she directs the MA in Performance Making and is Professor of Theatre and Performance. As an award-winning theatre director and writer, she continues to make new works internationally. She is currently co-Director of PeARL Artistic Research Lab with HSE Moscow. A classically trained dancer, she worked as a movement director, with X-6 collective, co-editing New Dance Magazine, and co-founded Chisenhale Dance Space. Artistic Director of the new writing company Paines Plough 1990 - 1995, among many projects she has researched the overlap between performance and medicine, completing a three-year Artist Residency with CREATE Ireland's EU-funded Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP) for Live Collision Festival, Dublin, 2018. For this she created a performed and published exploration of how anatomy (what bodies are made of) and culture (what bodies mean) overlap, confronting the fear and disavowal of mortality that visceral materiality conjures: www.iamnotapieceofmeat.com. Dear Body has emerged from this research.