Artistic Explorations

Dr Louise Atkinson is a visual artist, researcher, and facilitator, and is currently based at the University of Leeds as a Visiting Research Fellow. Her practice explores the relationship between art and ethnography, in which she employs a range of visual and digital media and techniques, including collage, zine making, animation, and repeat pattern design. Her work often incorporates processes of co-production and co-curation, creating new narratives with other people in response to existing archives, collections, and histories.

Her previous art and research projects include: No One Is An Island (2023), an augmented reality map produced with refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in response to the Shifting Borders exhibition at Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, University of Leeds; Multilingual Streets (2019-2021), a project using visual art and photography to respond to the visible languages on the street with multilingual pupils in Manchester; and ​​​​​Family Narratives of Being German in Yorkshire (2018), a large format, digital artwork based on documents, objects, and conversations with German expatriates and their descendants living in Yorkshire. 

In addition to her visual art practice, she is a founder and co-Director of The Highrise Project CIC, an organisation committed to supporting marginalised communities in Leeds through art and digital inclusion.

Jamie Hale is a writer, performer, and director who uses non-invasive ventilation. They make work across poetry, essay, theatre, and television that grapples with impairment, disability, the inevitable presence of mortality, and the urgency that brings to one's engagement with the world.

Jamie is the founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning CRIPtic Arts, which develops work with and by disabled creatives, centring creative accessibility within the work they are making. Jamie was awarded the Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund Director/Theatremaker of the Year award in 2021 for their first play, NOT DYING, which was staged at the Lyric Hammersmith, Barbican Centre, and HOME Manchester, and grappled with coming to terms first with dying, and then with living. Their second, I Want To Live, was staged at Theatre Royal Stratford East. Jamie was a 2021-22 Jerwood Poetry Fellow, and their first poetry pamphlet, Shield, was published to critical acclaim in January 2021. They are the founder and one of the judges of the Disabled Poets' Prize.

They are currently exploring cripping the classic texts in theatre, and the implications of centering disabled performers in a non-disabled canon.