Dr David Cottis

David Cottis is Senior Lecturer in Scriptwriting and Acting Director of Programmes for Film and Photography at Middlesex University.  He received his Ph. D from Birkbeck College.  He is also a theatre director, writer, critic, and dramaturg, most recently working with James Martin Charlton on the horror play Black Stone for Just Some Theatre Company.   His five-actor adaptation of Oliver Twist was taken on national tour by the Love and Madness Company, his short plays Cash and Semolina were seen at the Royal Court Theatre, London, and his opera libretto She Stops at Costa's was shortlisted for the English National Opera's 'New Voices' project. He has edited A Dirty Broth and A Ladder of Words, two anthologies of Twentieth-Century Welsh Plays in English for the Parthian Press, and contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, The Oxford Handbook of the Global Musical and Nigel Kneale and Horror: Medium, Culture, Time and Genre.  His book How Stage Playwrights Saved the British Cinema 1930-1956 was published by Bloomsbury Academic Publishers in 2025.