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Richard James Allen is a multi-award-winning Australian filmmaker, known for his work as actor, director, writer, choreographer, and creative producer.

ACTOR:

Richard James Allen's performing career as an actor, dancer and poet has taken him physically to hundreds of national and international theatrical venues, and virtually to film festival and television screens in over 30 countries around the world. Productions in which he has appeared have received multiple awards and nominations, including a shortlisting for an AACTA and a longlisting for an Oscar. They have been critically acclaimed in 'The New York Times', 'The Washington Post', 'The Guardian', 'The Observer', 'The Australian' and 'The Sydney Morning Herald'. His performances have been described as "extraordinary" ('ArtsHub', Sydney), "terrifying" ('The Village Voice', NYC), and "ferociously watchable" ('The Glasgow Herald').

Richard was a Finalist for Lead Performance at the Nightmares Film Festival, Columbus, Ohio, USA in 2021 for his portrayal of Hans in the psychological thriller 'Bloodshot Heart'. Critical praise: "A spectacular performance from Allen who captures all the little moments of someone who has suffered a traumatic event in his life and how his way of processing the events are doing more harm than good" ('Into:Screens'). "Richard James Allen's portrayal of Hans is something you must experience. His lovesick puppy act masks all the mysterious and deeply troubling emotions inside his head. The nuance he brings to Hans is astounding" ('Reel News Daily'). "Adore that lead performance. Richard James Allen's Hans moves so musically, he feels like he's from another world" (Alexei Toliopoulos).

DIRECTOR AND CREATIVE PRODUCER:

Richard James Allen is a director, with Karen Pearlman, of the critically acclaimed Physical TV Company (http://physicaltv.com.au). An AACTA nominated, Dendy, St Kilda, Brisbane and ATOM Award winning director and producer, Richard's films have been commissioned or purchased for multiple broadcasts by ABC and SBS-TV, and picked up for broadcast in China, Europe and on cable TV in the USA. His productions have travelled to over 300 film festivals or public screenings on six continents. They have garnered over 100 awards or nominations, and many have attracted grant funding or support through government or philanthropic arts funding bodies. As well as producing Karen Pearlman's trilogy of films about under-recognised Soviet women filmmakers, Richard recently produced two lower-budget long-form productions, 'Text Messages from the Universe' (which he also directed) and 'Bloodshot Heart' (which he also starred in), both nominated for Best Fiction Feature Film at the ATOM Awards. In addition to his creativity as a producer, director, writer, actor and dancer for the screen, Richard is an acclaimed Australian poet. His first first novel, 'More Lies', was published by Interactive Press in 2021. He also has an extensive track record of creating critically lauded works for the stage and edited a landmark national anthology of writing for performance.

CHOREOGRAPHER AND DANCER:

One of Australia's most versatile dance artists, who in his creative scope has been compared to Sir Robert Helpmann*, Artistic Director of The Physical TV Company Richard James Allen has combined a unique international career as a choreographer, director, writer, dancer, artistic director, producer, festival director, scholar and educator, with work screened, broadcast, published, or performed in thirty countries, and nominated for or winning major prizes in dance, filmmaking, screenwriting, playwriting, poetry, new media and scholarship. Richard has choreographed and directed for the stage (in a range of venues from nightclubs to mid-size theatres to large scale houses), for site specific and outdoor festival locations (including a stage floating on a lake, a travelling ferry, and a harbour side dance for motor cycles and an enormous crane), for film and television (from shorts to features to music videos), and for new media platforms (from mobile phones to machinima captured in 3D online immersive worlds to interactive installations).

Frequently broadcast on ABC-TV, Richard's work has been critically acclaimed in "The New York Times", "The Village Voice", "The Glasgow Herald", "The Australian", "The Sydney Morning Herald" and RealTime", and supported in Australia by Australia Council for the Arts, Australian Film Commission, NSW Ministry for the Arts, NSW Film and Television Office, Critical Path and Ausdance NSW. His dances have been presented overseas by organisations such as The Kitchen (NYC), Danspace Project (NYC), National Performance Network (USA), British Arts Council (UK), The Place (London), and The Third Eye Centre (Glasgow). ). In addition to his own companies, Physical TV (Sydney) and earlier That Was Fast (New York and Sydney), Richard has created commissions for ABC-TV, SBS-TV, New England Computer Arts Association (Boston), The Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center (New York City), Colloquium Contemporary Dance Company (NYC), The Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne (France), Dance North (Townsville), Dirty Feet (Sydney) and Tasdance (Launceston), where he was also an Artistic Director.

Dance film productions by Richard James Allen and Physical TV have screened at major screendance festivals worldwide including New York's Dance on Camera Festival, Cinedans in Amsterdam, Napolidanza in Naples, London's Dance on Screen and Constellation Change Festivals, Dance: Film in Edinburgh, dança em foco in Brazil, agite y sirva in Mexico, the International Video Dance Festival in France, and many others of equal calibre. They have won two ATOM awards, two Gold Medals for Excellence at the Park City Music Festival, two Australian Screen Composers Guild Awards, and Audience Choice Awards at the World of Women Film Festival and the Australian Poetry Festival. They been nominated for five Australian Dance Awards, prizes from the Dendy Awards for Short Australian Films, the Australian Screen Editors Guild, Australian Society of Cinematographers, Australian Screen Sound Guild, Reeldance and IMZ Dance Screen, and further ATOM and WOW Awards.

Richard has been described as a "master of choreography, as well as of dance, and cinema" (Nova, Italy). His work "points the way to the possibilities that abound when collaboration occurs across forms and new technologies are integrated into the totality of the vision," Hunter Cordaiy, "RealTime".

(* Associate Professor James Tulip, The University of Sydney)

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