My role
I took up my current role as Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of College: Creative Arts & Technologies in January 2025. I am also Professor of Textile Practices & Feminisms. I joined the University in January 2023 as Head of Westminster School of Arts, having been Head of Research Programmes at the Royal College of Art, Head of Fashion Visual Culture, MRes Visual Activisms and Fashion Research Coordinator at Middlesex University. I have taught and examined at a number of UK and international universities.
With a background in Maths and Textiles, I bring to the College a creative and interdisciplinary vision, focused on ensuring we have graduates who can take up high quality roles in their sectors. This background positions me well to lead across the four schools of the College: Architecture and Cities, Westminster School of Arts, Computer Science and Engineering and Westminster School of Media and Communication.
My Pro Vice-Chancellor role is concerned with leading on the strategic development and governance of our digital footprint. This is particularly exciting in a time of great change and development and I look forward to working with the teams to ensure we harness emerging capabilities while retaining our core values and person-centred approaches in all matters.
I draw on my textile research as a model for my leadership and strategic development, particularly ways in which textile structures, processes and language can be deployed in community building and ensuring equity is baked into all areas of the College and University.
I am currently Chair of the University Research Ethics Committee, overseeing developments and compliance for our researchers. I particularly enjoy the capacity to take complex, nuanced needs and create agile, clear and structured frameworks that ensure both efficiency and creativity simultaneously.
Teaching
I have extensive doctoral supervision experience across a range of creative disciplines. My pedagogies are framed around compassion and a determination to deliver robust and rigorous practice-led, active teaching and learning.
I have wide experience of training supervisors in the pedagogies of doctoral development, supporting a broader range of approaches that are researcher-led.
Research
My research is focused around the capacity of textile practices, processes and materials to offer language and methods for understanding and articulating what it means to be in community. In this I take material methodologies, such as stitch, weave, seams and fraying as starting points for thinking, which becomes rich and fertile ground that is also vernacular in its approaches and roots.
I have a number of publications, including my monograph: A Philosophy of Textiles: between practice and theory and a co-edited volume: Transnational Belonging: female agency in the arts. Both are now available in paperback. I have a forthcoming volume of the Bloomsbury Encylopedia of World Textiles: Volume 2 – Wovens, which I am co-editing.
External roles
I am a practicing artist, regularly exhibiting artworks with the 62 Group of Textile Artists of which I am the current Chair, a prestigious group of artists founded in 1962 by a group of women textile practitioners to bring to the public the very best of textile art; this remains the group’s vision and persistence.
I am a regular reviewer for a range of journals and publishers across textiles and feminist art practices; I was until recently Regional Editor for Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture. I mentor and provide support for a range of colleagues externally, leading the Women in Leadership and EDI work for CHEAD (council for higher education art and design), for which I am also currently a trustee.
I am an AHRC Peer Review College Member and I sit on a number of governance bodies and working groups within the art and design education sector.