Our Researchers

Bram is also Associate Lecturer at  Falmouth University and Creative Fellow at the University of Exeter.

His research interests include autoethnography, ecological arts practice, conservation and conversations around re/wilding, regenerative agriculture and the politics of being and selfhood in the Anthropocene. He is currently developing a number of projects on the Lizard in Cornwall at the intersection of contemporary arts research and re/wilding, conservation and the politics of land in collaboration with Professor Caitlin DeSilvey at the University of Exeter. He has undertaken post-doctoral research as a National Productivity Investment Fellow at Falmouth University in collaboration with the National Trust. Published papers include writing for the New Statesman, Digital Creativity Journal and the Living Maps Review.

As an artist he has developed a practice of Romantic Conceptualism that does not restrict itself to traditional boundaries, mediums or modes of practice, but rather develops a responsive way of being and making that is composed of and by its present context. He has exhibited internationally in exhibitions from New York to St. Petersburg.

Exhibitions include: This is The Future, Chiltern Sculpture Trail; British Art Show 6, Newcastle; Deptford X Festival, London; Conflux Festival of Psychogeography, New York; Artisterium, Tbilisi, Georgia; Performance Writing 12, Arnolfini, Bristol; Sideways: a festival of walking, Belgium; Remote Performances, Outlandia/Resonance FM, Scotland; Venice Biennale; HIDE, Secret Garden Party, Cambridge; Hermitage, Newlyn Gallery and Unbounded, Eden Project.

bramthomasarnold.com

Having originally trained as a lighting designer she pursued a career as a light artist working across art, music and theatre before forming the art partnership London Fieldworks, working over two decades to produce works that respond to ecology as a complex inter-working of social, natural and technological worlds. These works, often socially engaged and involving extended periods of research, have been made in the landscape, for the gallery, screen and radio.

Jo has been awarded International Fellowships and residencies to undertake research and fieldwork, including at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California; Headlands Center for the Arts, USA; Space Plasma Physics Group, Dept. Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester; Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts, Iceland; Vatnasafn/Library of Water, Iceland; Living Art Museum, Iceland; Northeast Greenland National Park; and Reserva Ecológica De Guapiaçu, Brasil. Her collaborative projects, films, artworks and architectures have received awards, honours and special mentions from Ars Electronica, VIDA International Art and Artificial Life, The Arts Foundation, AJ Architecture Awards and London Short Film Festival.

Jo has a Master’s (Distinction) in curating art, design and new media and completed her AHRC-funded doctorate in 2020, receiving her PhD for Library of Light: a framework to explore light, material culture and social experience from the University of Sunderland, UK.
Jo has co-edited a number of publications including Null Object: Gustav Metzger thinks about nothing, published by Black Dog (2012); Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture, a project centred on London Fieldworks’ Outlandia project in the Scottish Highlands, published by Routledge (2015). Her recently authored, Library of Light: encounters with artists and designers, was published by Lund Humphries (2019) and examines the role light plays in the new frontiers of art, design and technology and its impact on our cultural history. Most recently Jo has collaborated with writer and thinker Timothy Morton on a future documentary Confronting our Erasure Through Art for BBC4. She also recently contributed the essay Violence Power, Surveillance: From the Blind Lantern to the Searchlight for “White Torture” to a bilingual publication (German/English) published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König to accompany Power! Light! a forthcoming exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2021-22).

londonfieldworks.com

Tracey was Director of the Arts and Cultural Management programmes at Dartington College of Arts from 2002–2006. She was co-curator of the Edge Biennales in London, Newcastle and in Madrid European Capital of Culture. She was Combined Arts Officer at Arts Council Great Britain and Gallery Publications Officer at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As an independent curator, she worked with a wide range of international artists including James Turrell, Marina Abramovic, Helen Chadwick and Isaac Julien.

Her books on contemporary art include The Midden (Garret, 2018), Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture (Routledge, 2015) and The Artist’s Body (Phaidon, 2000).

She has published numerous catalogue essays and journal articles on a wide range of contemporary artists including Christian Thompson, James Turrell, Hayley Newman and Marcus Coates. Her recent fiction includes the future fiction, The Water Age (Meanda Books, 2018) and historical fiction, The Drowned Court (Impress, 2017). Her future fiction writing has a particular focus on water. She was shortlisted for the Impress Prize for Fiction and is currently working on a biography of three medieval sisters, entitled Three Female Lords, which received an Authors Foundation grant. She was awarded a Literature Wales Writer’s Bursary and a Santander Research Award. She has undertaken art residencies including Modern Art Oxford; MIT, Cambridge, US; Helsinki International Artists’ Programme, Finland; Maison Daura, Saint Cirq Lapopie, France; Outlandia, Glen Nevis, Scotland and Matadero, Madrid, Spain. She has curated many artists’ projects and residencies, including working with Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, Marina Abramovic, Helen Chadwick, Cornelia Parker, London Fieldworks and many more.

traceywarrwriting.com

Pavel has worked for more than two decades in higher education in America and has always been drawn to colleges and universities whose curriculum fully integrates learning with practice and thinking with embodiment.

Having taught and served as Dean for nearly 15 years at Vermont’s Sterling College, Pavel brings a depth of experience to Schumacher College’s unique approach to experiential learning. While pursuing research in ecologically-minded curriculum design and teaching courses in environmental philosophy, Pavel is also a passionate endurance and adventure runner. Over the past five years through a project called Climate Run, Pavel has covered hundreds of miles in the Arctic and subarctic on foot in order to bring attention to the connections between our bodies and the more-than-human world in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

Pavel holds a Ph.D. in English and is the author of many articles, chapters, and two books: Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010; and This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains, 1784-1911. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. He is currently working on a book titled Resilience in the North: Adventure, Endurance, and the Limits of the Human, which threads together personal narrative and observation with environmental philosophy and reflections on what it means to be human.

His current research focuses on four interrelated themes: ecological design thinking, deep empathic design, systems design thinking and contemplative inquiry. With over 20 years of professional practice, mostly working with IDEO global design company, Roberto has designed products, environments and experiences for clients across Europe, America, India and the Far East. He holds a number of international design awards and patents - and his work has been featured in Domus, Business Week, Design Week, The Observer, and NewDesign magazine. Roberto studied Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.

She holds an MA Critical Theory and Creative Writing (Poetics) from the University of Sussex and was awarded a TECHNE doctorate from The Royal College of Art in 2020. Both her academic and creative work are primarily concerned with relationscapes: modes of relationality and reciprocity. Her research interests lie within the realm of what she chooses to refer to as “internalised capitalism”, the ways in which narratives of pace, productivity, value, belonging, containability and appropriateness shape and move through both physical and cultural bodies and contribute to ecological crises and social justice issues.

Sarah draws on subversive arts thinking, alternative practices of imagination, forms of unknowing and non-dominant cultural cosmologies, with a particular emphasis on everyday creative resistance. She endeavours to work within a care-led, slow scholarship framework that gratefully acknowledges indebtedness to the activism of academics of colour, indigenous, minority, feminist and queer knowledge. She has also trained extensively in somatic and movement practices and is passionate about embodiment politics. She spent several years working as a hand paper maker, developing a haptic, text-based arts practice in the process that has been exhibited internationally.

Alongside her role on the EDT programme, she has been working with interdisciplinary teams on multiple projects in relation to the problem of soil erosion in East Africa. Her main responsibility is to engage local communities in co-designing pathways to change and ensure local problems are responded by local wisdoms.

Mona has a background in craft and design. After doing an undergraduate degree in Craft and Material Culture at the University of Art, Tehran, Iran, she completed MDes and PhD in Design at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Her doctorate thesis is an exploration of the role of unmediated relationship with the environment in the evolution of human consciousness. Her aspiration is to reintroduce the embodied and relational qualities of craft practice into regenerative design processes, particularly in participatory approaches to Transition.