Research Degree Supervisor Profiles
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.
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).
Dr Hilary Carlisle
Dr Carlisle's research interests follow three strands: firstly, she works in the area of innovative textile design by creating non-repeating patterns for digitally printed textiles. This involves developing software algorithms to generate subtle random variations in pattern designs for fashion and interiors; Secondly, she investigates the socio-cultural aspects of pattern on clothing and thirdly she researches the area of reflective practice in Art & Design education. Dr Carlisle has recently showed work at the 'Future Voices: Celebrating Diversity' exhibition accompanying the 'New Craft: Future Voices' exhibition in Dundee (2007) and the 'Art of Research: Research Narratives' symposium at Chelsea College of Art and Design (2008).
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.
Dr Rob Hillier
Dr Hillier's practice and research as a designer is currently focussed 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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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