About Birkbeck Creative Practice Lab
Birkbeck’s Creative Practice Lab (CPL) is a London-based network of artist-academics exploring the methods, modes and meanings of practice research in the university, in the creative industries and in the relationship between the two. A collaborative space for playful experimentation, CPL aims to build an interdisciplinary community of practice researchers working in the fields of film and screen media, theatre, creative writing, visual arts and digital media.
We host workshops, public events and training programmes that occupy and explore the space in and around practice research in the creative arts, including curating, programming and archival practice. In doing so, we sustain an ongoing dialogue around the following questions:
- In what different ways can creative practice constitute research in the academy?
- What is gained, and what is lost, when we identify ourselves as artist-academics and practice researchers?
- Where are the limits of these categories as currently assumed, and how might those boundaries be most productively challenged?
We understand practice research as research in which knowledge is generated through making: knowledge that is embodied, material and often tacit, and which may be articulated through, not merely about, creative work. CPL develops shared methods for documenting and articulating practice, values process, risk and failure as part of research, and helps researchers make their work legible as research within and beyond the academy. We give particular attention to practice-based PhDs, offering peer critique, work-in-progress sharing and support for supervisors and examiners.
Each year we host a small number of Honorary Research Fellows and Artists in Residence whose interdisciplinary practice research intersects with these questions. We also support Birkbeck’s community of PGR practice researchers through workshops, conferences and student-led initiatives.
Housed in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication, the Creative Practice Lab draws on the School’s creative practice spaces: the Derek Jarman Lab, Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image (BIMI) at the Birkbeck Cinema, Centre for Contemporary Theatre, Peltz Gallery, Immersive Learning Centre, Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology, and the Centre for Creative AI.
Practice research serves people whose knowledge is grounded in doing. Many Birkbeck students and staff are working practitioners who bring their professional expertise into their research. Rooted in Birkbeck’s tradition of combining work and study, the CPL gives institutional form to a way of working that is already a distinctive part of who we are.
Director
Members
Suzannah Biernoff
Luisa Calè
Angel Cohn Castle
Bartek Dziadosz
Esther Leslie
Janet McCabe
Joel McKim
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Simone Wesner