VU Lecture by Laura Karreman and Ulrike Quade On December 1st, 2025, Dr. Laura Karreman—Associate Professor in Media and Performance Studies at Utrecht University (UU)—and Ulrike Quade—theater director, artistic researcher, puppeteer, and scenographer—gave a lecture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) titled The Dramaturgy of Robots on Stage. The lecture was presented in the context…

Science and theatre seem like two different worlds. Yet theatre can tell us something about what our future with robots will look like. ‘Theatre knowledge is relevant to robot development.’ Daan Appels wrote a series about feelings for robots for NEMO Kennislink, the journalistic platform of NEMO Science Museum. In his first article, he talks

On 26th and 27th September 2024, Amy Winter and her collaborators at TU/e’s Material Aesthetics Lab, Maaike Bleeker and Marco Rozendaal organised a workshop that delved into the potential of soft robotic technologies to animate expressive forms, creating novel interactions between humans and systems. Results of the workshop were presented at the Dutch Design Week

“If, as Shakespeare famously claimed, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’, robots are the new kids on the block.” Prof. dr. Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) The podcast ‘Acting Like A Robot’ is about the research of the same name within which the VU, UU, HKU and Ulrike Quade…

On 4 March 2025, Maaike Bleeker presented the paper ‘The Human-Robot Ensemble: Designing Expressive Movements for Restaurant Service Robots’, written by Hyumin Lee, Nazli Cila, Klaas Koerten, Maaike Bleeker and Marco Rozendaal, at the HRI’25 in Melbourne. HRI’25 is the 20th edition of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. At HRI, researchers and practitioners

The Centre for Transformative Media Technologies (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) invites you to attend a presentation by  Professor Maaike Bleeker – Utrecht University  “In this presentation, I will share experiences from several years of collaboration in which we brought together expertise from the arts and theatre, robotics, and academic research and invited guests with…

ELRAT | European Lab for Robots in Arts and Theatre

What does it take to move a robot? Acting Like a RobotFilm: The Transketeers Special thanks to Stadsschouwburg Utrecht

ELRAT | European Lab for Robots in Arts and Theatre

Pick me up, kick me out!  On 21 February 2025, the Dutch newspaper NRC published an interview with Maaike Bleeker on the research project Acting Like a Robot, which concluded festively on 31 January 2025 at De Paardenkathedraal. Read the article here (in Dutch)