Mark Nicholls

Mark Nicholls has been performing on Melbourne stages since the age of six. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rear Four Theatre — the company through which he has written and premiered his own plays since 2008 — and was previously the Artistic Director of Crispin Theatre Company.

His Unconventional Women series, published in full by Prahran Publishing, spans ten plays and follows a recurring world of women navigating theatre, love, and the complicated terrain between the two. Each play premiered through R4 in Melbourne before finding its readership in print.

By day, Mark is Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, where he has taught film and held senior academic administrative roles since 1993. He is a film journalist who worked for many years on ABC Radio and contributed a weekly film column to The Age between 2007 and 2009.

His academic books are published by McFarland, Pluto Press, Indiana University Press, and Berghahn Books. His most recent, The Ballets Russes (1908–1913) on Stage and Screen (McFarland, 2026), examines the Diaghilev company's formative years through firsthand accounts and documentary film reconstruction. Earlier major works include Lost Objects of Desire: The Performances of Jeremy Irons (Berghahn, 2012) and Scorsese's Men: Melancholia and the Mob (Pluto Press & Indiana University Press, 2004). He has also co-authored and contributed to academic journal editions on Italian cinema and culture, including a 2019 volume on Visconti's Il Gattopardo.