People within Music, Drama, Dance and the Performing Arts research

Dr Murat Akser

Senior Lecturer in Screen Production

Murat Akser is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Production and Director of MA in Film and Television in the School of Communication and Media, Ulster University. Previously he served as a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, the Chair of the New Media Department, and the Founding Director of the Cinema and Television MA program at Kadir Has University Istanbul, Turkey.

He received his MA degree in Film and his PhD in Communication and Culture from York University, Canada. Dr. Akser has been lecturing in film, media and culture since 1997 at different HE institutions including Bosphorus U., York U., Ryerson U. University of Toronto, KHU and Ulster University. He works extensively on film genre storytelling, independent cinema and film parody, and has recently published a book-length studies on cinema and media, such as New Cinema, New Media: Reinventing Turkish Cinema and Alternative Media in Contemporary Turkey.

Murat Akser is also a practicing filmmaker with experience in Toronto and Northern Ireland film industry as a cinematographer, editor, screenwriter and director. His feature screenplay, Rise and Fall, has been accepted to Sundance Screenwriter's Lab in 2014 and his most recent film The Gift won Best International Short FIlm at Dublin Silk Road International Film Festival.

For more information on his film work please visit: Murat Akser Film Work. Dr. Akser is a member of International Cinematographers Guild, Academy of Canadian Film and Television and Executive Board Member of European Communication Association.

Dr Brian Bridges

Research Director - Music, Drama, Performing Arts, Film & Screen

Brian Bridges is Senior Lecturer in Music and Creative Audio, and has served as Research Director for Music, Drama, Performing Arts and Film/Screen Studies since 2017.

He led Ulster’s submission to the UK REF (Research Excellence Framework) 2021 assessment, which saw his unit being ranked joint first in the UK for research impact. He is a composer/sonic artist, electronic musician and arts-technology researcher, having graduated from Trinity College Dublin (MPhil in Music and Media Technologies, 2003) and National University of Ireland, Maynooth (BA in English and Music, 2001; PhD in Music, 2013), in addition to private studies in the US with Glenn Branca (2005) and Tony Conrad (2006), supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Research fields include composition and installation practices, musical HCI, sound design, modular synthesis, soundtrack studies, microtonality, and spatial/immersive music.

Particular research interests include embodiment and environment in creative practices and technologies, as well as the various ways in which music and sound evoke, or sometimes challenge, concepts and experience of materiality, agency, and presence.

Research Interests

I am interested in the application of embodied and perceptual models to musical practices, sound design, and the design of performance systems and interfaces, as well as immersive audio/music practices. Essentially, I see these interests as inhabiting the crossroads between music and sound, our instruments, our technologies, and our broader experience of the world.

I have published in the proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression, International Conference on Auditory Display, International Computer Music Conference, in journals such as the Journal of Sonic Studies and the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, and in volumes on sound design published by Routledge (including Focal Press) and Springer.

I currently serve on the editorial board of Organised Sound (Cambridge). I was previously Vice-President (2015-17) and President (2017-19) of ISSTA, the Irish Sound, Science, and Technology Association during a period of expansion which saw it gain significant international reach (with participants from three continents), as well as serving on the board of open access journals Interference: a Journal of Audio Culture (2014-23) and Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2019-23).

My creative outputs include sound–based spatial/immersive installations, audiovisual pieces, and electroacoustic and acoustic composition, with particular interests in microtonal and drone music.

My work has been programmed at festivals in Europe, the Americas and China, receiving support and commissions from arts organisations including the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, the Contemporary Music Centre and Resonance FM, and I was active in (and was a co-founder of) the Dublin-based Spatial Music Collective from 2006-17.

Recent performances include Huddersfield and Belfast festivals in 2023, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2024.

Other interests include connections across the art-technology and arts-science divide, and I co-founded the Hearts of STEM (2016-18) and Oscillations and Modulations conference-festivals (2018-present), the latter being the first conference-festival on the island of Ireland devoted to modular synthesis and related practices.

I am leading on the £460k+ Presence Lab project at Ulster’s Derry~Londonderry campus (funded by the Higher Education Research Capital scheme, with majority from NI DfE) and I am also a co-investigator within the AHRC CoSTAR (Convergent screen technologies and performance in realtime) network.

I am interested in hearing from potential collaborators or PhD students with ideas related to the topics above.

Lee Cadieux

Lecturer - Cinematic Arts

Dr Giuliano Campo

Lecturer in Drama

Dr Rob Casey

Lecturer in Music

Professor Elizabeth Crooke

Professor of Museum and Heritage Studies

Professor Elizabeth Crooke is Principal Investigator of UK Research and Innovation funded-project Museums, Crisis and Covid-19: Vitality and Vulnerabilities (Dec 2020-May 2022), which is investigating how the museum sector will emerge and refocus in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.

The project is in collaboration with the Museums Association, NI Museums Council, National Lottery Heritage Fund, and regional museums in Northern Ireland.

This new UKRI project builds on her position as a leading academic in museum and heritage studies and her close connection with the museum sector.

Her co-edited collection Heritage after Conflict: Northern Ireland (Routledge 2018) brought together scholars with varying perspectives on the heritage landscape in Northern Ireland post-1998.

Her peer reviewed journal articles can be found in Memory Studies; Cultural Geographies; International Journal of Heritage Studies; Irish Political Studies; Liminalities: Journal of Performance Studies; and Journal of the History of Collections.

In collaboration with the Irish Museums Association, she is co-supervising a Northern Bridge AHRC-funded Doctoral Research Project investigating the character and legacy of EU funding in the museum sector in Northern Ireland and border counties.

Elizabeth has been invited to speak at museum and academic events by the Association of Critical Heritage Studies UK, Arts and Humanities Research Council, University of Toronto, V&A, Trinity College Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, National Museum of Ireland, University of Stockholm, and University of Antwerp. She has examined PhDs at Universities of Cambridge, Cardiff, Leeds, Limerick, Newcastle and Northumbria.

She has made a significant contribution to the Northern Ireland museum sector as Chair Board Directors, NI Museums Council (Sept 2015-Jan 2021) and as a current Board member.

She is part of the Museum Standards Programme Advisory Committee, Heritage Council (Ireland) and has served on the Board of Directors Irish Museums Association. She was CI on the AHRC-funded First World War Engagement Centre Living Legacies (2014-2019).

Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick

Senior Lecturer in Drama

Lisa Fitzpatrick studied in Trinity College and University College Dublin prior to completing her PhD at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto.

She is currently Head of the Research Graduate School for her Faculty, and is a Senior Lecturer in Drama. She teaches critical theory, dramaturgy, and Irish Theatre, and supervises PhD students in contemporary Irish theatre and post-conflict performance research.

Education

Ph.D. Drama, Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto (The Emergence of a Postnationalist Aesthetic in Irish Drama 1980-2000), 2003
MA Modern Drama, University College Dublin, 1995
Diploma in Business, University College Dublin, 1991
BA English Literature, Trinity College Dublin, 1990

Research Fields

Lisa has published extensively on performance and violence, post-conflict theatre, and gender. She has received funding from the British Academy and the Canadian High Commission, and has been an invited speaker at a number of events, including the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), the Warwick Politics and Performance Network, and the Irish Theatrical Diaspora project.

She was the convener of the conference 'The North: Exile, Diaspora, Troubled Performance', at the School of Creative Arts in Derry in 2012 and co-convenor of the ICAN (International Culture Arts Network) Festival at the Playhouse in Derry in 2013.

She is a founding member of the Irish Society for Theatre Research, and convenes the Society's Gender and Performance Working Group.

Professional Affiliations

Lisa is external examiner for Drama at University College Dublin, and has been external examiner at PhD level.

She is a member of the Peer Review Council of the AHRC and has assessed post-doctoral funding applications for the National University of Ireland.

She has reviewed books for Performance Paradigm, Theatre Research International, and Times Higher Education, as well as acting as reader for Modern Drama and a number of scholarly publications.

Professor Brian Irvine

Professor of Music

Professor Anthony Lilley

Professor of Creative Industries

Professor Frank Lyons

Associate Dean (Research & Innovation)

Frank Lyons is Professor of Music and Associate Dean of Research and Impact in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Ulster University. He has developed an international profile as a composer and researcher with over 150 performances and exhibitions of his works having been given in China, Japan, Australia, South Africa, the US, Europe, the UK and Ireland and broadcast on BBC, RTE, NPR and ABCFM by some of the world’s leading soloists and ensembles.

In 2010 he was awarded the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs Media Art Prize with media artist Masaki Fujihata for their interactive installation piece Simultaneous Echoes which has been exhibited in Canada, Germany, Japan and Poland. His intermedia piece The River Still Sings, co-commissioned by the City of London Festival and Derry~Londonderry City of Culture 2013, was premiered by the Fidelio Trio in June 2013. The River Still Sings features a newly commissioned poem by Seamus Deane, narration by James Nesbitt and video by Paul Moore. His groundbreaking piece, NonZeroSum for inclusive ensemble was performed across Europe in 2017 to widespread acclaim and was showcased in a multi-site networked performance in March 2019.

He has developed an international network of research collaborations in the field of creative technologies and disability under the ‘Inclusive Creativity’ banner; this work was rated as ‘world-leading’ in the most recent UK research assessment exercise REF2014.

Frank recently co-led the successful Future Screens NI bid to AHRC Creative Industries Clusters programme which secured funding of £13million to support the development of creative industries in Northern Ireland.

Frank was awarded an MBE for services to higher education and music in the New Year’s Honours list 2020. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Co-Director of the Creative Industries Institute and Co-Director (Partnerships) of Future Screens NI.

Education

1999PhD (Composition)  Ulster University
1996LTCL (Guitar Pedagogy) Trinity College London
1995BMus(Hons) Ulster University

Research Fields

Composition, Musicology, Music and Community

Professor Tom Maguire

Head of School of Arts & Humanities

Tom Maguire is Professor of Contemporary Drama and Performance and Head of the School of Arts and Humanities. He teaches, researches and supervises doctoral projects in Drama and Museum & Heritage Studies.

He is a Co-Investigator on two major projects currently. The first is Future Screens NI which delivers expert technical skills, opportunity and growth across film and broadcast, animation, games and immersive technologies and industries in Northern Ireland.

The second is Museums, Crisis and Covid-19: Vitality and Vulnerabilities, which is investigating how the museum sector will emerge and refocus in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.

Tom co-edited with Professor Elizabeth Crooke the collection Heritage after Conflict: Northern Ireland (Routledge 2018) that brought together scholars with varying perspectives on the heritage landscape in Northern Ireland post-1998.
His peer reviewed journal articles can be found, for example, in the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English; the Journal of Hate Studies; The International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen; and Strenae.

Tom has been invited to speak at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh; University College Dublin; Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

He is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow of Ulster University and a Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy. He was awarded Honorary Life Membership of the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments.

Tom is the elected Chair of the Board of the International Theatre for Young Audiences Research Network and a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College. He chairs the Board of Big Telly Theatre Company and is a Board Member of Young at Art, Belfast.

Dr Victoria McCollum

Senior Lecturer in Cinematic Arts

Dr Victoria McCollum is a Senior Lecturer in Cinematic Arts and Director of Development and External Partnerships (Arts & Humanities) at Ulster University. An award-winning educator and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, she is widely recognised for her leadership in inclusive, creative and socially impactful education. Her research, which includes 8 published books, explores how storytelling across film, games and TV can challenge dominant narratives around trauma, identity and conflict, particularly in post-conflict contexts.

Victoria’s leadership spans research, community engagement and innovation. She was part of the academic team that secured over £536k in funding for a cutting-edge Virtual Production Facility at Ulster University and co-leads The Witches of Islandmagee Creative and Digital Project, dedicated to recovering and honouring the legacy of persecuted women (and men) in Ireland’s past. She is deeply committed to widening participation and equity in the arts and has pioneered international field trips to Mumbai for students from underrepresented backgrounds, enabling them to learn filmmaking skills on the ground in Bollywood, an initiative that blends global creative industry experience with transformative educational access.

Victoria has previously held positions at BBC, ITV, MTV and HBO (Time Warner Inc), and has collaborated on projects with Apple, Cartoon Network, Cinemax, Facebook, New Line Cinema, Sesame Street, Sky Atlantic, Telltale Games, Time Warner, Twitter and Universal Music Group.

At the local level, Victoria co-leads a mentoring programme for teenage girls in Derry City in association with YMCA, supporting young women to build confidence, creativity and ambition in their personal and educational journeys. She recently spearheaded a landmark collaboration with the Irish Labour Party to name the University’s Derry-based film studio after Mo Mowlam, honouring the legacy of peace-building and political courage, officially launched by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Outside her professional work, Victoria is a qualified equestrian coach and is currently training in Equine Facilitated Learning (EFL), using human–animal connection to foster emotional resilience and wellbeing. She is guided by a deep belief in the transformative power of creativity, community and compassion to drive meaningful change.

Dr Adam Melvin

Lecturer in Music

Professor Paul Moore

Professor of Creative Technologies

Professor Moore has worked as a Senior Manager in the further education sector having joined Ulster University in 1999.

He has since been active in the development of the creative arts/industries policy in the University becoming head of the School of Creative Arts and Technologies in 2008.

He was awarded a personal chair in 2009 becoming Professor of Creative Technology at the Magee campus.

Research Fields

Paul's research is focused on both the creative industries and the ways in which theory and practice can be brought together in training and education.

He has published widely in a range of journals and his own practice is in the area of sound art. He has produced a number of commissioned gallery exhibitions in Coventry, Belfast, Lough Neagh, the Void Gallery Derry and, most recently, the National Gallery in Namibia.

Professional Affiliations

Professor Moore was chair of the Visonic Arts group in Belfast and is the Ofcom Content Board member for Northern Ireland.

From 1995 to 2004 he was also a board member of the Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission. He was a member of the Digital Britain Working Group on Digital Participation (2009) and was a member of the UK Digital Participation Consortium.

He also chairs the NI Media Literacy Hub and wrote the Digital Participation Plan for NI which was launched in March 2010. In his spare time he is a freelance broadcaster with BBC Radio Ulster and has written and presented a range of documentaries for BBC national radio.

Dr Jennifer Goddard

Lecturer in Drama

Professor Declan Keeney

Professor of Screen Technologies & Innovation

Declan Keeney, PhD, MA, BMus(Hons), LTCL, PgCHET, PgDIP, SFHEA, FRSA is a Professor (Chair) of Screen Technologies & Innovation at Ulster University & Director of the Ulster Screen Academy.

Professor Keeney is Co-Founder & Interim CEO of Studio Ulster Ltd, a £72m ($91m) 75000ft2 commercial Virtual Production Studio complex with a dedicated UKRI AHRC funded CoSTAR R&D lab currently under construction at Belfast Harbour Studios in NI. One of the Belfast Region City Deal Pillar Innovation projects.

He is a member of board of the British Film Institute acting as Northern Ireland Governor and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. Professor Keeney is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the British Council’s Arts & Creative Economy Advisory Group and a Visiting Professor at Liverpool John Moores University. His current research in support of the screen industries represents £91.5m ($116m) worth of live grant-based research and development investments.

Declan is a Policy Fellow of the Future Observatory at the Design Museum in London. An AHRC/DCMS funded fellowship exploring net zero and carbon reduction in the Screen Industry.

Declan leads the CoSTAR Lab in NI, a £17m investment in R&D&I in Creative Technologies, Virtual Production & Real-time production. CoSTAR forms the largest research network for VP in Europe. With colleagues at UU he secured £3m from the Levelling Up Fund for a flexible virtual production studio & £25.2m from the Belfast Region City Deal fund.

Declan is a Co-investigator at Future Screens NI, a £13m AHRC funded Creative Cluster, and a Co-investigator on a £3.2m EPSRC Network+ grant ‘Virtual Production in the Digital Economy’ with partner Universities, York, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and the University of the Arts in London. He is also Co-I on a Green Transition Ecosystem AHRC funded £4.6m ‘Future Island’ project working with Rathlin Islanders aim to be NetZero.

Declan leads on skills and curricula development as an expert in screen technologies and innovation within the Ulster Screen Academy. In 2021, the Academy, officially opened a £1.6m Virtual Production studio training facility at Ulster University's Belfast campus, the first of its kind in any university in the UK or Ireland and became an Unreal Academic Partner.

Over 25 years of broadcast media experience, including 13 years as staff at the BBC. Originally from Donegal in the Northwest of Ireland Declan is researching emerging technology applications of 6DoF, world building, photogrammetry, LiDAR scanning and virtual production for film and broadcast. He is also a festival board member for @RENDR_Festival.

Dr Laura Aguiar

Lecturer in Cinematic Arts

Dr. Laura Aguiar is a multimedia content creator and educator with over 10 years of experience in the education, heritage and arts sectors.

Her practice-based research focuses on making history, art, and heritage more accessible and engaging through participatory creative projects in Northern Ireland. She is particularly interested in participatory approaches to storytelling and community engagement and how this can benefit individuals, organisations, and society on a number of levels (mental health, skills building, resourcing, accessibility, diversity, and community relations).

As a multimedia content creator, Laura has a produced a body of work ranging from documentary films, VR films to interactive websites and exhibitions. As an educator, Laura has delivered 35 community engagement programmes and has published a number of articles and chapters on participatory storytelling over the last 10 years.

Laura is the co-founder and co-director of the Rathmullan Film Festival, a participatory film festival based in a rural village in county Donegal, northwest of Ireland. By actively involving locals from all ages in film programming, event management and filmmaking projects, Laura has helped the festival grow since its first edition in 2018. To date, six festival programmes have been delivered, over 40 films have been made by locals and over five thousand people have visited the festival (in person and virtually), establishing Rathmullan within the Irish film festival circuit.

She holds a BA in Journalism (Fumec University), MA in Media and Communication (Stockholm University), and a PhD in Film Studies (Queen’s University Belfast).

Gerard Gibson

Lecturer in Screen Production

Dr Michael McKnight

Lecturer in Screen Production

Professor Darryl Charles

Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Games

Darryl Charles joined Ulster University in 2001 and is a member of the Computer Science Research Institute. Darryl is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. His research background is in computational intelligence and he has applied his expertise in this area to serious games and apps as well as a number of research contexts such as intelligent interactive storytelling, machine learning in games, user modelling, cloud computing, and connected health. Recent research has been mainly focused on health contexts and creating software with natural user interfaces to help motivate people to engage with learning, exercise and rehabilitation. Since 1998 he has had over 80 papers published in peer reviewed journals and conferences as well as an authored book entitled Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games.

Darryl graduated from Queens University Belfast with a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Hons.) in 1988. After qualifying as a teacher at Stranmillis College, Belfast, he taught Technology and Design to A-Level at Portadown College until 1995 and during this spell completed an MSc in Microelectronics and Microcomputer Applications at the University of Ulster. After a spell as Head of IT at Cox Green School in Maidenhead he returned to full-time education to study for a PhD on Unsupervised Artificial Neural Networks at the University of Paisley. While completing his PhD he was appointed as a lecturer and subsequently as a senior lecturer in Computing at Paisley before returning to Northern Ireland in 2001.

Dr Therese Charles

Lecturer in Games Design & Development