Dr Cherie Driver

Overview

Teaching and Learning

As Associate Head of Belfast School of Art from 2020–2025, Cherie led Academic Quality and Student Experience across the School’s portfolio, with a particular emphasis on curriculum development, widening access and participation, and inclusive approaches to art and design education. Since 2025, as Deputy Head of Belfast School of Art, her leadership remit has expanded to include the development of international partnerships and strategic initiatives centred on people, place and partnership, with a particular focus on inclusivity, community engagement and strengthening the School’s relationships across local and international networks.

Cherie is academic lead for Creativity in Peacebuilding, a four-credit module developed in partnership with the MAC Belfast for New York University. Situated within the particular social, cultural and political landscape of Northern Ireland, the module explores the role of creative practice in peacebuilding and provides students with opportunities to learn through direct engagement with artists, cultural organisations, community practitioners and places shaped by histories of conflict and reconciliation.

Cherie’s approach to teaching emphasises experiential and situated learning, bringing academic enquiry into dialogue with creative practice, place and lived experience. She is particularly interested in forms of teaching that move beyond the conventional classroom, using encounters with artists, communities, cultural spaces and contested landscapes to encourage critical reflection and dialogue. Her teaching creates opportunities for students to make connections between theory and experience, and to consider how artistic and cultural practices can open alternative ways of understanding complex social and cultural questions.

Research and Creative Practice

Cherie’s research and creative practice bring together contemporary art, feminist and psychoanalytic aesthetics, Jungian and post-Jungian thought, and practice-based approaches to relationships between psyche, image and place. A parallel strand of her research explores socially engaged art, creative pedagogy and cultural practice within contested and post-conflict contexts.

Recently, her research has developed through the MA in Art, Psyche and the Creative Imagination at Limerick School of Art and Design (2024-2026). Bringing Jungian arts-based research into dialogue with terrapsychological inquiry, her practice-based research explores relationships between psyche, landscape and creative practice, centred on the mythic and imaginal landscape of Mide, or the Fifth Province of Ireland, the archetypal feminine and the recurring figure of the feral cat. Cherie is a member of the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS).

This research has generated creative and scholarly outputs. In 2026, Cherie exhibited in The Alchemical Imagination at Limerick School of Art and Design, accompanying the 11th Annual Art and Psyche Symposium. In 2025, she presented Folding Shadows, Unfolding Psyche: Alchemical Transformations in Painting and Concertina Books at the international Alchemy Conference 2025: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research at the University of Oxford.

Her research into creative practice and peacebuilding was presented at SUNY Purchase College, New York, in 2025, where she delivered Restorative Justice: Creative Practices in Peacebuilding as part of The Art of Peacebuilding: Education, Empathy, and Engagement in Uncertain Times. This strand of research informs her teaching and her continuing interest in experiential approaches to learning through creative practice, place and lived experience.

Civic and Cultural Leadership

Cherie maintains an active role within the visual arts and cultural sector in Northern Ireland, developing partnerships that connect Belfast School of Art with artists, organisations and communities. This includes ongoing collaborations with the MAC Belfast, Void Art Centre in Derry, including supervising doctoral research engaging with the Orchard Gallery archive, and MACHA Press through exhibitions and related activity at Belfast School of Art. She was previously Chair of Bbeyond, Northern Ireland’s performance art organisation, and continues to support partnerships that strengthen relationships between the School, the wider cultural sector and the communities it serves.