About me
I am an award-winning educator, filmmaker, screenwriter, and researcher whose career bridges professional screen practice, higher education and creative research.
Currently Course Leader for the MA Film, Television and Moving Image and Senior Tutor for the School of Media and Communication, I am passionate about helping emerging filmmakers and screenwriters develop original, intellectually ambitious and emotionally resonant work.
My professional practice as a writer and director spans fiction, documentary, docudrama, television drama and screen-dance. I have been commissioned by a wide range of organisations and production companies, including Channel 4, BBC2, the New Zealand Film Commission, South Pacific Pictures and Television New Zealand. My films have screened at major international festivals including Berlin, Locarno, Montreal, Valladolid and Edinburgh, and have been broadcast internationally, released theatrically and exhibited in gallery settings.
My research combines scholarly inquiry with practice-based approaches to screenwriting and filmmaking. It is driven by a longstanding concern with asymmetries of power and voice, which I interrogate through relationships between creativity, collaboration, embodiment, and emerging technologies in storytelling. I have published on collaborative creative practice, screenwriting, intercultural filmmaking, adaptation, and early digital cinema and presented research internationally through conference papers, seminars and masterclasses. My current research focuses on two projects: an exploration of generative AI's capacity to analyse and generate subtext in screenwriting, and a practice-research investigation into therapy-supported autofiction screenwriting as a means of transforming lived experience into creative work.
Drawing on experience as both a practitioner and scholar, I bring industry knowledge, research expertise and a deep commitment to creative development to my teaching, supervision and leadership. Across all aspects of my work, I am interested in how screen stories can generate new ways of thinking, feeling and connecting with others.
Teaching
I currently lead the Screenwriting, Industry Practice and Practice as Research modules on the MA Film, Television and Moving Image and supervise MA and doctoral research projects. On undergraduate Screen courses, I have also led the Dissertation, Working with Actors, and Understanding Screen Performance modules, taught into first and second year production modules, and supervised dissertations.
I began my teaching career at the University of Auckland. Prior to joining the University of Westminster, I held film practice lectureships at the University of Waikato and the University of Kent, where I was awarded the Faculty of Humanities Teaching Prize.
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and have led curriculum development at four universities in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand, designing 14 new modules and two new courses that foster intellectually curious, creatively ambitious and industry-aware practitioners.
Research
At the heart of my research is an interest in how collaboration, interdisciplinarity and emerging technologies can challenge unequal power relations and open up new possibilities for creative processes and outcomes.
My PhD investigated cross-cultural creative collaboration and transnational funding structures in a small nation film context. I have published on this topic, as well as on adaptation, political documentary film, and creative innovations enabled by new low-cost technologies.
More recent practice-based research investigated collaborative creative methods that harness the potential for movement, musicality and improvisation to enrich film content development. Working with choreographers, composers and actors, this interdisciplinary work has resulted in invitations to deliver masterclasses, workshops and conference papers in France, Finland, Aotearoa New Zealand, Germany, Australia and the UK. Outputs from this research include films, screen practice experiments and related peer reviewed journal articles.
I am currently developing two research projects in the field of Screenwriting Studies. One examines the potential of generative AI to analyse and generate subtext in screenplays, contributing to emerging understandings of human–AI collaboration in creative writing. The other is a participatory practice-research project investigating how therapy-supported autofiction screenwriting can benefit women who were estranged from their birth mothers in childhood, while generating new insights into this under-researched experience.
Publications
For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.