Our Team

Sam West

Founder, Co-Director

Sam West co-founded Wrestling Resurgence in 2017 and serves as its Creative Director. The creative work of the company — booking shows, building storylines, developing talent relationships, and shaping the overall direction of the promotion — is something he does in close collaboration with co-founder John Kirby. Alongside that shared creative work, Sam leads on event production and the company's publicly funded arts projects.

Sam came to wrestling through the arts. Before founding Resurgence, he spent a decade working in the contemporary art world, including several years as a curator at the University of Leicester's Attenborough Arts Centre, where he worked with artists using performance, film, and photography to explore the politics of the body and identity. Wrestling Resurgence grew directly out of that work.

In 2019, Sam left the Attenborough Arts Centre to begin a PhD at Loughborough University. His doctoral thesis — Bodies of Work: The Storytelling Art of Professional Wrestling — is an autoethnographic study of independent wrestling as a narrative art form, drawing on his experience as a promoter, booker, and lifelong fan. He passed his viva in September 2023 and graduated in summer 2024. The thesis is publicly available via the Loughborough University research repository.

At live events, Sam works from the tech desk — managing AV, cueing music, and coordinating the show from start to finish.

John Kirby

Founder, Co-Director

John Kirby co-founded Wrestling Resurgence in 2017 and works as a producer for the company. The creative work of the company — booking shows, building storylines, and shaping what Resurgence is — is something he does in close collaboration with co-founder Sam West. Alongside that shared creative work, John leads on audience development, ticketing, and marketing, as well as the operational detail that makes a live event run smoothly.

John is Programming Manager at the University of Leicester's Attenborough Arts Centre, where he manages the theatre programme and talent development initiatives. He has worked in the arts for over a decade, and that background shapes how Resurgence thinks about its audiences — with attention to the experience of the room, and a genuine investment in building a community around the shows.

At live events, John manages the door, runs ticketing, and rings the bell to mark the start and end of each match.

Claire Warden

Founder, Commentator & Collaborator

Professor Claire Warden co-founded Wrestling Resurgence in 2017 and has been a long-term research collaborator and creative partner ever since.

Claire is a professor whose research crosses disciplinary and methodological borders, with a particular focus on theatre, performance, and popular culture. She is the author of three monographs — including the British Academy-funded Migrating Modernist Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), which won the Society for Theatre Research's Anthony Denning Award — and co-editor of Performance and Professional Wrestling (Routledge, 2016), the field's most significant academic collection. She is currently Principal Investigator of the British Academy-funded Health and Wellbeing in Professional Wrestling project.

Claire's involvement in Resurgence has always spanned practice and scholarship. She co-produced the founding events, has contributed to the company's publicly funded projects, and has served as lead colour commentator at Resurgence live events — working from the balcony alongside broadcast colleague Joe Kennard to bring the in-ring action to the promotion's digital audience.