John Glancy

John Glancy is the Executive Producer for Schools and Families at Imperial War Museums where he is responsible for creatively developing the learning programmes across all five IWM sites and online.

The decade prior to joining IWM he worked as an actor, director, producer, facilitator and tea maker at various regional theatres across the UK including Perth Theatre, the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh and the Lyric Hammersmith in West London.

John fundamentally considers himself a storyteller first and is always actively seeking out new and innovative ways to tell these stories to people from all walks of life as culture should be for all. John is particularly interested in creating work that addresses complex history and the impact it has on diverse global communities.

MuseumNext Museums, Games and Play Summit
Monday, 28 February 2022

Difficult history and using games design in learning programmes

In November 2021, IWM launched a new Holocaust Learning programme developed with a leading games designer and an Oliver award winning dramaturg. At the heart of this work were philosophical questions about how the mechanics of gaming can enhance agency and empathy in museums.  We asked ourselves how they can act as a platform to critically discuss some of the most difficult subjects in human history in a sensitive and accurate way, supported by a national collection. This involved challenging our own pre-conceptions about learning approaches and trying new ones that pushed boundaries and created new possibilities for audiences to connect with difficult history.