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Richard James Allen is a multi-award-winning Australian filmmaker, known for his work as actor, director, writer, choreographer, dancer, and creative producer.
ACTOR:
From his first professional gig as an actor in the KISS International Theatre Research Group in Holland, to ten years spent as a dancer/actor based in New York City, to returning to Australia as Artistic Director of Tasdance in Tasmania, and then The Physical TV Company in Sydney/Gadigal, Richard James Allen's forty year performing career has traversed national and international theatrical venues, film festivals, and television screens in over 30 countries on six continents.
Recent features and short films he has appeared in have received multiple awards and honours, including 'Woman with an Editing Bench' (ATOM Award for Best Short Fiction); 'Final Broadcast' (29 international awards); and 'I want to make a film about women' (24 awards, plus a nomination for an AACTA and a longlisting for an Oscar). 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 for his portrayal of Hans in the feature film 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).
Praise for his most recent performance, in the docudrama 'Breaking Plates', which won Best Short Documentary at the 2025 Antenna Documentary Film Festival, included: "Allen also brought, in his acting, his dancing skills, making his movements appear like he was floating in the scene" ('Rochford Street Review').
DIRECTOR AND CREATIVE PRODUCER:
Richard James Allen is a director and co-founder, with Karen Pearlman, of the critically acclaimed Physical TV Company. Based on unceded Gadigal and Dharug lands in Sydney, Australia, they create dramas, documentaries, and dance films informed, in a scholarly but playful way, by research into the history and the future potential of the cinematic medium.
An AACTA-nominated, Dendy, St Kilda, Brisbane and five-time ATOM Award-winning producer and director, Richard's films have been commissioned or purchased for multiple broadcasts by ABC and SBS-TV, and been picked up for broadcast in China, Europe and on cable TV in the USA. His productions have travelled to around 500 film festivals on six continents, including all of the most selective and prestigious dance film festivals in the world. They have garnered well over 100 awards or nominations, many have attracted grant funding or support through government or philanthropic arts funding bodies, and a number have been added to the collections of 10 major film archives around the world.
Recent films Richard has written and directed include: the short, 'Digital Afterlives' (critically compared to Walt Disney's masterpiece 'Fantasia'), and the feature, 'Text Messages from the Universe', which have won twelve awards. Recent films he has produced include: Karen Pearlman's latest pair of hybrid documentaries 'Breaking Plates' and 'Impossible Image', and her earlier acclaimed trilogy 'An Editor's Anthology', winner of 34 thirty awards; Parish Malfitano's critically lauded psychological thriller 'Bloodshot Heart', winner of several awards and nominated for Best Fiction Feature Film at the ATOM Awards; and Samuel Lucas Allen's award-winning drama shorts 'After Saturn', 'CUT', and 'Misery and Other Choices', in pre-production.
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)
WRITER
In addition to his creativity as a director, producer, actor, choreographer and dancer, Richard is an acclaimed Australian poet and writer. Richard's writing has appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and online, and he has been a popular reader at multiple performing arts venues, over many years. His latest book, 'Text Messages from the Universe' (Flying Island Books, 2023), reflects a lifelong engagement with Buddhist and Yogic philosophies. It was a Finalist at three international book awards: 'Poetry: Narrative' at the 2024 International Book Awards; 'da Vinci Eye' for books with outstanding cover art at the 2024 Eric Hoffer Awards; and 'Poetry: Narrative' at the American Book Fest's 2024 Best Book Awards. Its author portrait also received Honorable Mention as a Semi-Finalist at the 2023 Head On Photo Awards. A film adaptation of 'Text Messages from the Universe' which Richard wrote, choreographed, directed and produced for The Physical TV Company, screened, in different versions, at festivals in France, Spain, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Italy, India, Australia, Nepal and Turkey. It won six awards, including Best Screenwriter of the Year Award at the Mumbai International Film Awards, and was a Finalist for Best Narrative Feature Film at the SAE ATOM Awards in Melbourne.
His novel, 'More Lies', published by Interactive Press in 2021, was, in an earlier incarnation, shortlisted for the Griffin Award for New Australian Playwriting. An audiobook, read by him, will be released in 2025. A suite of poems, Minimum Correct Dosage, was commissioned in 2019 by Red Room Poetry, as part of its Poetry Fellowship project. Earlier critically acclaimed books of poetry and fiction include: 'The short story of you and I' (UWA Publishing), 'Fixing the Broken Nightingale' (Flying Island Books), 'The Kamikaze Mind' (Brandl & Schlesinger) and 'Thursday's Fictions' (Five Islands Press), shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. Richard co-edited 'Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts', a landmark national anthology of writing for performance for Currency Press and RealTime.
EDUCATION / TEACHING
A First-Class Honours graduate from Sydney University, Richard won the Chancellor's Award for best doctoral thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has studied internationally with countless industry leaders in theatre, dance, film and creative writing. He has been a lecturer or guest artist at over two dozen universities, including: AFTRS, NIDA, SFS, ACPE, AMPA, CEACAPA, and WSU.
