\ \ Her work is rooted in contemporary performance art. Her research interests are voice, sound and song as cultural signifiers, as tools for spiritual practice and as a means of interrogating language. She work's across sonic traditions, with improvisation techniques and via different modes of listening. She is interested in trans-national techniques of mantra and meditation, and how language, sound and repetition are used as transcendental vehicles in these practices. She also uses mantra-like repetition and improvisation to demonstrate the mutability and difficultly of language. \ \ Nicola integrates her expanded vocal technique with the influence of Yogic breath practices and classical North Indian vocal music. She is currently training in Dhrupad with Pandit Uday Bhawalkar. \ \ She also experiments with modes of listening and somatic practice in performance, pedagogic and social justice settings. Most recently, using Yoga Nidra as a tool to support global majority activists in connecting to ancestral wisdoms. \ \ She uses prop and costume to play with the aesthetics of sound, as well as exploring the physicality of the ‘improvising body’ – testing out embodied states as performative devices. Experiments include weight training and ritual fasting as a precursor to vocal improvisation. \ \ She also makes speculative and post-performance works on paper. \ \ Recent teaching posts include Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and Practice at Manchester Metropolitan University (2021 - 2024) and Teaching Fellow, Leeds University (2019 - 2021). She holds a practice-led PhD entitled 'On the thesis-by-performance: a feminist research method for the practice-led PhD' from Northumbria University, Newcastle (2017).