Dr. Dylan McGarry is an educational sociologist and artist from Durban, South Africa. He is a Senior researcher at the Environmental Learning Research Centre (ELRC) at the University currently known as Rhodes. As well as a co-director of the Global One Ocean Hub research network. Dylan is the co-founder of Empatheatre, and a passionate artist and story-teller. He explores practice-based research into connective aesthetics, transgressive social learning, decolonisation, queer-eco pedagogy, immersive empathy and socio-ecological development in South Africa. His artwork and social praxis (which is closely related to his research) is particularly focused on empathy, and he primarily works with imagination, listening and intuition as actual sculptural materials in social settings to offer new ways to encourage personal, relational and collective agency. Dylan is also the co-founder of the Institute of Uncanny Justness
Empatheatre was founded by Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni and Dylan McGarry in 2014. The South African theatre company and methodology has been heralded for its unique approach which sees the creative team forging creative responses to complex social concerns while uniting a range of stakeholders including policy-makers, citizens, indigenous knowledge holders, storytellers, artists, musicians, activists, human-rights lawyers and academics.