Claire French is an academic, dramaturg and playwright. As an academic, Claire has brought together language, power and performance in leading international journals with recent publications ‘Harnessing sociolinguistic variation when writing documentary theatre’ (Theatre Research International) and ‘Facilitating departures from monolingual discourses’ (Applied Theatre Research). She has won several awards from Horizon Europe, the Mellon Foundation, Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

As a playwright, French’s plays include The Tongue (2025); Courage Songs (2024) and The War Party (2014). She has been a dramaturg and producer to playwrights including Sonja Linden and the company Visible Ensemble, London, with plays Roundelay (2017) and Who Do We Think We Are (2015) both running at the Southwark Playhouse, London. French is also a socially engaged theatre practitioner, working with intergenerational community groups (The Old Vic, London), female Muslim migrants (Saathi House, Birmingham), Indigenous and multilingual young actors (Mellon Foundation, Johannesburg), and refugees (Evelyn Oldfield Foundation, London). 

French has lived in Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, South Africa and presently Denmark, where she is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at Aarhus University.