Keynote Speaker: Dr Suzy O’Hara
Dr Suzy O’Hara is a curator, and researcher based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Through her research at CRUMB, her curatorial practice and her post-doctoral role with Creative FUSE North East, Suzy seeks to both nurture and understand evolving relationships between the Arts and Creative, Digital and IT sectors, explore new models of collaborative commissioning for the production of interdisciplinary art and creative practices.
Suzy recently completed her practice led, AHRC funded PhD at CRUMB, University of Sunderland, entitled “Collaborations between Arts and Commercial Digital Industry Sectors: A Curatorial Practice-led Investigation of Modes of Production”
Her latest projects include; Little Inventors, a project that turned children’s inventions ideas into real objects by drawing together partners from across art, design, manufacture, commercial business and education; Sunderland 10 x 10, a project by Sunderland Cultural Partnership, that supports North East based artists and creatives and nurtures the development of contemporary arts in collaboration with local Sunderland businesses and Rewriting the Hack, the North East’s first Women Only Hackathon that examined the Hackathon format as a site for producing collaborative, interdisciplinary art strategies and explored issues surrounding diversity an increasingly popular model of creative production. Suzy is also founder and curator of Thinking Digital Arts, in collaboration with Thinking Digital Conference.
Dr Sarah Hill
Sarah Hill is an Early Career Academic Fellow in Media, Culture and Heritage. She is predominantly interested in feminist film and media studies and is currently researching disabled girls’ self-representation practices online. She is also writing her monograph, Young Women and Contemporary Cinema: Gender and Post feminism in British Film, based on her PhD research undertaken at the University of East Anglia.
Dr Sarah Bennison
I am an interdisciplinary researcher (cultural politics-languages- anthropology-history) with a primary interest in the relationship between identity and landscape in the Peruvian Andes.
In 2016 I completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Newcastle University (School of Modern Languages) and a year on, I now work as a Research Fellow at St Andrews University (Department of Social Anthropology) on a Leverhulme-funded project.
https://st-andrews.academia.edu/SarahBennison
Hannabiel Sanders
Hannabiell Sanders is an African American Jamaican, originally from New Jersey-USA and holds a BFA in Music from Mason Gross School for the Arts, Rutgers University and a Masters and PhD in Music Performance at Newcastle University. Hannabiell is a charismatic musician and progressive music teacher who is committed to using music to break stereotypes and bring diverse communities together. With a musical career starting at the age of 9 she has become an award winning performer, bass trombonist, African & Latin hand percussionist, composer, and activist who has taught music and performed in the USA, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, South Africa, Mozambique, Gambia, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Italy, France, Dominican Republic, and Spain.