Dr Adele Senior is a Reader in Theatre and Performance at Leeds Beckett University. Their current research focuses on child activism, transgenerational performance, and the participation of children in UK and European contemporary performance for adult audiences.

Their work is deeply committed to making space for children's cultures, knowledges, and lived experiences within performance scholarship and practice. As part of this commitment, Adele co-edited an issue of an academic journal with a family of artist-activists entitled ‘On Children’ (Performance Research), to which children contributed as co-editors and authors alongside internationally renowned scholars and performance makers.

Adele’s related projects have included facilitating child-authored manifestoes on performance with young people in the UK and Germany, devising post-performance workshops to document and archive children’s experiences of participating in professional work, and organising an academic conference with children as keynote speakers, contributors and chairs. Adele has recently finished writing a monograph entitled Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance (Routledge 2024), which considers how contemporary performance offers more capacious representations of the people we call children, beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within many mainstream contexts.