Staff Research
NUA has an international reputation for its research in 'Art and Design Interpretation and Curation' and 'Animation and Sound Design'. 35% of its research was classed as 'world leading' or 'internationally excellent' in the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise. A further 50% of its research was recognised internationally in RAE2008.
Our research in the areas of Animation and Sound Design focuses on practical and theoretical aspects of animation and sound in academic and commercial contexts. Research in this area aims to promote interaction between experimental, independent and commercial production, exhibition and criticism.
Our research in the areas of Interpretation and Curation focuses on practical and theoretical aspects of the interpretation and curation of contemporary art, design and media. Research in this area aims to contribute new insights to the understanding of art, design and media in contemporary culture.
We work with Universities, Museums, Galleries, and Creative and Cultural Industries throughout the world to develop exciting and relevant research. Our international research activities explore new ways in which art, design and media practice, interpretation and curation contribute to contemporary culture, society and public well-being.
Professor Lynda Morris
Professor Morris is the Curator of EASTinternational the international open submission exhibition, which has been realised in collaboration with a series of eminent invited selectors since 1991. Her activities as a curator and a writer have been concerned with issues of perception, conceptual art, and resistance in art and politics. She was responsible for the first UK exhibitions of several now well-recognised artists including Agnes Martin (1974), Bernd & Hilla Becher (1974-75) and Gerhard Richter (1977). Professor Morris is a Principal Investigator for the major AHRC funded research project 'Picasso; Peace and Freedom' with Tate Liverpool, the Albertina (Vienna) and the Louisiana (Copenhagen).
Find out more about Professor Lynda Morris.
Professor Suzie Hanna
Professor Hanna's research includes practice-based collaborations with other artists to create animated films. Recent projects have been selected for international animation and film festivals and for UK broadcasts. She has also given papers at international conferences and industry seminars and has worked as a series consultant for an international children's animation series 'Faisal and Friends'. Her recent short animated film 'The Girl Who Would Be God', which was commissioned for the 75th International Plath Symposium, focused on previously un-researched aspects of Sylvia Plath's early adulthood.
Find out more about Professor Suzie Hanna.
Dr Hilary Carlisle
Dr Carlisle's research interests follow three strands: working in the area of innovative textile design by creating non-repeating patterns for digitally printed textiles, investigating the socio-cultural aspects of pattern on clothing and researching the area of reflective practice in Art & Design education. Her work in innovative textile design involves developing software algorithms to generate subtle random variations in pattern designs for fashion and interiors. She has shown work at exhibitions including ‘Future Voices: Celebrating Diversity' in Dundee and the ‘Art of Research: Research Narratives' symposium at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Work has featured in publications including ‘The Craft of Organic Programming' in Future Voices: Celebrating Diversity exhibition proceedings.
Find out more about Dr Hilary Carlisle.
Dr Krzysztof Fijalkowski
The principal focus of Dr Fijalkowski's research is the visual, literary and intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century avant-garde, above all the work and legacy of the international surrealist movement. Recent projects have focused on surrealism in Eastern Europe, surrealism's contributions to the fields of photography, design and psychoanalysis, and the movement's contemporary legacy and activity. His research activities have included academic writing, exhibitions, translations and visual practice.
Find out more about Dr Krysztof Fijalkowski.
Dr Rob Hillier
Dr Hillier's practice and research as a designer is currently focused on 'Sylexiad', a series of typefaces he designed and developed for the adult dyslexic reader. The research employed a series of comparative typeface testing techniques concerning legibility and readability to establish data that informed the design of the fonts. 'Sylexiad' has been featured in the design magazines 'Novum' (May 2008) and 'Étapes' (July 2008) and a paper about the research has been peer-reviewed in 'The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice' (2008).
Find out more about Dr Rob Hillier.
Dr Nicolas Maffei
Dr Maffei's research focuses on modernism, consumption and gender in American design 1918-1939. He has published academic articles in Design Issues (MIT Press) and The Journal of Design History (Oxford University Press). He has contributed chapters to Art Deco (V&A Publications) and The Design and Manufacture of Popular Entertainment (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). Dr Maffei has appeared on the Channel Five television series 'Art Deco' and was a consultant for the V&A exhibition, Art Deco, 2003. He organised and chaired the Design History Society's international conference, Sex Object: Desire and Design in a Gendered World, 2003.
Find out more about Dr Nic Maffei.
Dr Catherine Baker
Over the last three years Dr Baker has been developing ways to represent the understanding of drawing processes and particularly the active way we interact with visual material, focusing on the relations between vision and drawing as a phenomenological contemplation. She has been involved with a number of research projects with the Department for Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol.
In 2010 Dr Baker completed an Artist‐in‐Residence at CRICBristol, a cutting edge, clinical research facility supporting local, national, and international research. She has also been invited to be International Artist‐in‐Residence at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia and is a peer-reviewer for TRACEY, the International Drawing Research Journal, based at Loughborough University.
Find out more about Dr Catherine Baker.
Neil Powell
Neil Powell produces sculptural objects using a varied range of materials and idioms, from objects through to printed matter. More visible collaborations include work with Dr Michael Corris and Art & Language, ('The Artist Out of Work', Museum of Modern Art, New York 2000). He also works with artists as diverse as Lawrence Weiner, Alfredo Jaar, and the late Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose works formed part of the successful exhibition 'A Spectre at The Feast', which he curated in downtown Manhattan, New York City. Neil Powell's sculptural and written works attempt to problematise the linguistic turn in art from the mid 20th Century onward. Of special interest are areas such as Concrete Poetry, Sculpture in all its guises, and forms of Conceptual and environmental art.
Find out more about Neil Powell.
Victoria Mitchell
Victoria's work draws on anthropology, history, philosophy, biology and critical theory as a way of interrogating relationships between critical and material forms of textile. Examples frequently reference fine and applied arts and architecture, most recently in ‘Drawing Threads from Sight to Site' ('Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture', 2006). With Cathy Terry (Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service) she developed the 'Norwich Textiles Project', www.norwichtextiles.org.uk, from which research on Norwich textiles has grown. Victoria is a co-investigator for ‘Beyond the Basket', an AHRC ‘Beyond Text' project, which investigates basketry as process and as cultural reflection.
Find out more about Victoria Mitchell.
Tom Simmons
Tom's research and creative practice is focused on sound art and design. He is particularly interested in intersections between the ways we perceive and experience sounds and animated moving images. Individual projects have explored this through performances and installations, films, written publications and conference presentations, which have been presented in the UK, Europe, Australia, North and South America. A strand of his research is based on uses of the Internet in the distribution and mediation of sound art and design practices. Tom Simmons's work is collaborative in nature and has involved musicians, artists, filmmakers and scientists.
Find out more about Tom Simmons.
