José Dias is a musician and Assistant Professor in Critical Practices at CAMC. He has been developing practice- and ethnographic research on European jazz festivals, women representation in the music industry and music improvisation for silent film. José’s work challenges established notions of collective identity and memory through collaborative artistic practices with communities. He is the author of Jazz in Europe: Networking and Negotiating Identities (Bloomsbury, 2019), Festa do Jazz (INCM, 2020) and the documentary Those Who Make It Happen (2016). His albums have been widely acclaimed, and he has scored music for animation, film and television, as well as theatre and contemporary dance.
Simon Ellis works with practices of choreography and filmmaking. He was born in the Wairarapa in Aotearoa New Zealand, but lives in the UK and works at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University. He grew up in a family where conversations about human dignity and consumerism were common. These conversations have shaped his values as an artist, and underpin much of what his practice is about, and how it is conducted. Simon completed the first ever practice research PhD at the University of Melbourne (2005) and is currently researching non dual awareness in dance improvisation. www.skellis.net.
Kerry Francksen is an experienced educator, practitioner, researcher, and digital dance artist, with over two decades of experience in both the University sector and within the creative industries. Kerry has also worked as an arts facilitator, reviewer, and consultant with cross-sector organisations. As a recipient of a Daphne Jackson Trust Fellowship award (supported by the AHRC), she is currently a Research Fellow at C-DaRE, exploring the impact of virtual reality and artificial intelligence on performance practices.
Rebekka Kiesewetter is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC), Coventry University, and a member of the Post-Publishing research strand. From an intersectional feminist perspective, she works on the ethical, political, epistemic, and psychosocial dimensions of research, communication, and publishing using experimentation to enact more equitable and pluriversal futures for scholarly knowledge creation and sharing. Rebekka also is a Research Fellow on the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia funded Open Book Futures (OBF) research project; a co-convener of the Radical Open Access Collective; a co-editor of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers experimental book series with Open Humanities Press; and an editorial board member of the experimental open access journal continent..
Anthony Luvera is an Australian socially engaged artist, writer, and educator, and Associate Professor of Photography in the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University. The long-term collaborative work he creates with individuals and communities has been exhibited widely in galleries, public spaces, and festivals, including the UK House of Commons, Tate Liverpool, The Gallery at Foyles, the British Museum, London Underground’s Art on the Underground, National Portrait Gallery London, Four Corners, Belfast Exposed Photography, Australian Centre for Photography, PhotoIreland, Malmö Fotobiennal, Goa International Photography Festival, Les Rencontres D’Arles Photographie, Oslo Negative, and Landskrona Foto Festival. His writing has appeared in a range of publications including Trigger, Photography and Culture, Visual Studies, Photoworks, Source, and Photographies. Luvera is editor of Photography For Whom?, a periodical about socially engaged photography. He is Chair of the Education Committee at the Royal Photographic Society, and a Trustee of Photofusion. He regularly designs education and mentorship programmes, facilitates workshops, and gives lectures for the public education departments of National Portrait Gallery, Tate, Magnum, Royal Academy of Arts, The Photographers’ Gallery, Barbican Art Gallery, and community photography projects across the UK.
Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research, at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC), at Coventry University; and leads the centre’s Critical Practices research strand and Curatorial Research theme. She is a researcher and curator whose work explores ‘the curatorial’ as an investigative practice, expanding practice-based research in the fields of curating, visual arts, visual cultures and cultural studies. Rito is the editor of On the Curatorial (Floating Opera Press, 2024), FABRICATING PUBLICS: the dissemination of culture in the post-truth era (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg, 2020).
Kevin Walker leads a research group in AI and Algorithmic Cultures in Coventry’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures, working across technical development, anthropology and artistic research, through practice methods and collaborations with the cultural and creative sectors. Before joining Coventry he founded the Information Experience Design programme at the Royal College of Art in London, running it from 2012-2019.
