Our Staff

Abbie McKenna

Head of Centre for Apprenticeships Skills & Flexible Education

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 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.

Alan Hook

Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media

Alan Hook is a Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media, Associate Head of School for the School of Communication and Media, and a Researcher in New Media and Play in the University’s Centre of Media Research. He is a maker of experiences and oddities for Human and Non-Human Animals.

He has worked with games, immersive media and virtual environments development as a way to investigate and interrogate ideas of play, politics and identity for over 15 years displaying work in exhibitions such as Paraflows (Vienna), international festivals such as Zero1 in San Jose and RXIC in Riga.

He has exhibited virtual environments research in The Tech Museum, Americas largest Science and Technology Museum and continues to work with virtual environments and immersive game experiences as a way to build understanding of complex social, cultural and political issues. Alan’s current research looks at games as a way to tackle ‘wicked problems’ such as Climate Change or Civic and Societal Responsibility.

He has published a large body of work over the past 10 years which explores transmedia narratives, alternate reality games, and playful encounters with blended reality Fiction. He has written on ‘This is Not A Game’ (TINAG) as an aesthetic, Making a Murderer as a Transmedia Experience, Social Justice Storytelling, Indie ARGs, Networked Narratives, and produced a wide range of practice outcomes in the form of ARGs and ARG-like experiences.

Alan is Co-Investigator on the £13m FutureScreens NI AHRC Creative Cluster which explores emerging technology, the creative industries and economic growth (PI Prof Paul Moore). The grant delivers expert technical skills, opportunity and growth across film and broadcast, animation, games and immersive technologies and industries in Northern Ireland.

Through the partnership, Northern Ireland's creative companies will develop strategies to collaborative, grow productivity and maximise their global potential, delivering new jobs and a £400 million increase in GVA to boost the local economy.

He is Co-Investigator on the €2m Northern Periphery and Arctic Program (PI Dr Helen Jackson) Digi2Market. The project aims to address challenges that companies in peripheral areas may face, such as small size of market, distance from the market and isolation. The project explores how immersive technologies can help SMEs access new markets and support economic growth.

Alan is Co-Investigator on the UK Research and Innovation funded-project Museums, Crisis and Covid-19: Vitality and Vulnerabilities (PI Prof Elizabeth Crooke), which is investigating how the museum sector will emerge and refocus in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.

Outside his funded research Alan is working on a series of projects which explore speculative methods to increase inter-species empathy and understanding such as Equine Eyes, a headset that helps you ‘see like a horse’ and toolkits to help promote interspecies thinking as a form of speculative methodology.

Dr Catrin Rhys

Head of School of Communication and Media

Dr Catrin S. Rhys is Head of School in the School of Communication and Media and a Senior Lecturer in linguistics. She joined the university in 1995 after an ESRC funded PhD in Chinese Syntax from the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh and lecturing posts in York University and the University of Leon, Spain.

Dr Rhys’ research employs Conversation Analysis to examine language and social interaction in a range of different institutional and mundane settings. Her NIHR funded Real Complaints project, in collaboration with Bethan Benwell, focuses on the role of communication in complaints handling in the NHS, using conversation analysis to understand the longitudinal experience of complaining and to provide training materials for healthcare professionals handling complaints.

Jim Curran

Lecturer in Cinematic Arts and Course Director Cinematic Arts

Gerard Dunleavy

Creative Technologist

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).

Lee Cadieux

Lecturer - Cinematic Arts

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 Mark Benson

Lecturer in Screen Production

Life before Ulster

Prior to academia, Mark spent twenty years working in the media industry. During this time he produced, directed and developed programmes broadcast on the BBC, ITV, RTÉ, C4, UTV, TV3, Radio Ulster and TG4. In addition to documentaries for the UK Foreign Office and Channel 4, Mark's work comprised of multi-camera studio and location projects, live and as-live, that included formats for entertainment, music, comedy, magazine shows, chat shows and game shows. In addition, Mark developed, produced and directed single-camera presenter led location programmes.

Prior to his current position at Ulster University, Mark completed his PhD in History and post doctoral work at Queen's University, Belfast before taking up a lecturing post at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. Whilst at QUB, he also worked with the Widening Participation Unit.

Teaching

Mark currently supervises all final year projects linked to a multi-camera environment. As module coordinator he teaches Cinematography, Live Broadcast and the Diploma in Professional Practice (work placement year). Mark has previously taught Introduction to Storytelling, Short Film and acted as a dissertation supervisor.

Research

Social histories linked to abortion provision.

Mark T.S. Benson, Northern Irish Abortions: A History, 1900-1968 (forthcoming with
Liverpool University Press, 2025)

Jennifer Trouton and Mark T.S. Benson (eds), One of Many: a collection of artistic works and
short essays (Royal Hibernian Academy/UU/NI Arts Council funded publication, 2024)

Civic Roles

Royal Television Society, committee member (Northern Ireland)

Gerard Gibson

Lecturer in Screen Production

Adrian Hickey

Associate Head of School of Communication & Media

Life Before Ulster

Adrian Hickey worked as a Graphic Designer for the Alpha Newspaper Group as part of a team that produced ten print publications per week before joining Ulster. At Alpha, Adrian became proficient in industry standard techniques for image production from raw to prepress. This high paced environment enabled him to hone his page layout skills, (in Quark Xpress!) and design multiple advertisements and advertorial assignments for brands such as Lidl, Tesco, Ford, Alfa Romeo and Suzuki.

Adrian first began lecturing in Creative Media Production at the Northern Regional College (Ballymena) where he taught units in Page Layout and Design, 2D Animation and Video Installation amongst others. Soon after, Adrian started life at Ulster as a half-time Teaching Fellow in Media Arts, transitioning to full time in 2011.

Teaching

Adrian’s pedagogical approach can be broadly described as 'Problem-Based Learning' (PBL). Adrian’s Project- Social, www.project-social.co.uk, is a typical example of this approach. At its core, Project-Social is underpinned by the pedagogies of ‘Work Based Learning’ (Kolb, Lucas, Boud, etc.) and contemporary pedagogies of ‘Students as Partners’ (Healey).

Adrian encourages students to produce most of the work independently, using weekly sessions to pitch ideas, critique work in progress, set goals and resolve issues.

These scenarios can be loosely described as problem-based learning. “Problem based learning (PBL) is a pedagogical approach that suggests that learning is effective when the learner is empowered to undertake research into real problems or challenges applying both theory and practice to develop solutions.” (Lucas, 2010) Project- Social delivers an impactful learning experience replicating professional practice, which not only engages the students in subject relevant research activities, but which also has a real and meaningful impact in the communities in which they are situated. For this approach Adrian was the recipient of Excellence in Employability/Placement Support award at the UUSU Learning and Teaching Awards 2018. Project-Social was also shortlisted for an Irish Education Award in 2019.

Research

Adrian’s research is primarily practice driven and centres on using contemporary media practice to engage audiences in creative modes of expression and discovery. Using creative media practices, from augmented reality to animation, my research projects directly engage users through contemporary digital devices.

Much of his creative practice engages users from the wider community, opening up media practice to that audience as a means of communication and expression.

This practice research wants to engage with users that perhaps don’t have easy access to, or perhaps an understanding of, how contemporary media can be used to better society.

An example of this practice-based research is Generation Animation, a creative programme that encourages school children to discover the UNICEF Rights of the Child by animating their stories and Project Social, (www.project-social.co.uk), engaging students in their community by mentoring their media outputs for non-profit organisations.

Civic Roles

Much of Adrian’s teaching and research engages the civic, through either problem based learning approaches or participatory action research scenarios.

He has also designed and developed workshops for Ulster's Schools Outreach STEM extravaganza ‘All SySTEMs Go!’, resulting in high-quality, subject-specific events as part of Ulster’s strategic plan for widening access to higher education.

Adrian is also actively engaged in working with industry through Invest NI's Innovation Voucher scheme, completing consultancy projects in the Tourism, Recruitment, Music and Video on Demand (VOD) industries.

Professor Anthony Lilley

Professor of Creative Industries