Daria Skjoldager-NielsenPhD student
About me
Daria holds two MAs – in Marketing (2007) and Theatre Studies (2012), both from the University of Lodz (Poland). She began her research as a PhD candidate within Theatre Studies in summer 2015, and she is writing her dissertation on audience development under the working title: Strategies for Audience Development in Swedish Public Theatres. The strategic model of audience development proposed in this thesis, as a prism of theoretical focal points, will combine:
- marketing – as a tool for decreasing the number of empty seats in the auditorium (Cashman 2003, Maitland 1997),
- cultural policy – as a strategic consequence of cultural policy on the institutional level, with the goal to remove barriers to participation (Belfiore 2002, Kawashima 2000 and 2006, Hansen 2013),
- and theatrical event – on how audience development programmes through different activities surrounding the performances may best accommodate both artistic creativity and intentions and spectators’ needs and interests (Sauter 2000, 2008).
The research goals are:
1) to take audience development theory beyond the common understanding as marketing or cultural policy tool;
2) to provide knowledge about praxes and strategies of audience development in significant Swedish public theatres; and
3) to provide both practitioners and researchers with a new model for introducing and analysing audience development programmes.
Daria is a treasurer of the STUTS (Stiftelsen för utgivning av teatervetenskapliga studier). Since 2012 Daria serves as vice-chairwoman of the Rococo Foundation, where she coordinates Observatory of Culture, which is a programme of extensive research as well as diagnostic and analytical work in the field of culture and cultural education.
She was also an elected students representative on the board of the International Federation for Theatre Research IFTR.
Daria’s research interests include audience development, marketing approach to the theatre, education in cultural institutions and cultural policy.