Professor Natasha Lushetich

About me

I am an interdisciplinary theorist-practitioner. At UWE Bristol, I am Professor in Digital Media, Art & Theory, and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ENERGY: A Philosophy of Practice (2023–2027). I joined UWE in May 2026 from the University of Dundee where I was Professor of Contemporary Art, Media & Theory, Associate Dean of Research, Co-Director of the Leverhulme Doctoral Programme in Regenerative Innovation regenr8-i and Dundee’s Executive member of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.

I am the founder-member of subRosa and the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies such as Fulbright (NYU, NYC); Steim (Amsterdam); Noorderzon (Groningen); and ArtsLink (Cleveland & NYC). My artistic work has been shown in conventional venues – museums, film and performance festivals, in Europe, Asia, and the US – in less conventional venues – banks and the street – and supported by the Art Council of England; The Mondrian Foundation; The VSB Foundation; The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; and The Dutch Fund for the Performing Arts, among others. I hold a theoretical PhD from the University of Exeter and my recent research has been largely theoretical with practice-based components.

Area of expertise

In my research I rely on theoretical methods such as diffractive reading and media archaeology, and practice-based methods like artography and deep mapping. I focus mainly on critical mediality, global art and artistic epistemology, the status of sensory experience in cultural knowledge, and structure and infrastructure. My last research project (also funded by the AHRC, 2020–2022), is: The Future of Indeterminacy: Datafication, Memory, Bio-Politics.

Prior to this I led the NAC and LaSalle-funded Imaginations of Disorder in Art, Science and Philosophy (2016–2018); the HASS- and Maudsley Foundation-funded Spaces of the Mind (2013–2016); and the Bridging the Gaps-funded Critical Gaming (2012–2013). I have authored and edited 8 books and my recent writing has appeared in AI & Society; Artnodes; Contemporary Aesthetics; Environment, Space, Place; Leonardo; Media Theory; On Curating; Parallax; Performance Research; Rhizomes; The Philosophical Salon; TDR; and The Journal of Somaesthetics and in a number of edited collections.

I have delivered over fifty invited talks, keynotes, and workshops at academic institutions, such as the Universities of Cambridge, Duquesne, Nanyang, NYU, Sorbonne, Utrecht and Western Australia, among others; at cultural institutions like De Balie and Felix Meritis, Amsterdam; and at public sector institutions, such as Bethlem Royal Hospital, London. I sit on the editorial board of the Anthem Series in Critical Thought and the international board of Contemporary Aesthetics, and I act as research assessor for NWO (Dutch Research Council) and FNSNF (Swiss National Science Foundation), among other national and international funding bodies.

Current Research students:

Margaret Kerr: Recovering What has been Left Behind: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Interconnected Ways of Knowing (final year, University of Dundee)

Nuo Cheng: Seeing Through Cavalier Perspective: Hieronymus Bosch’s World and Chinese Spatial Perception (thesis defended in March 2026, corrections submitted in April 2026).

Jodie Williamson: Towards a Technology-Informed Philosophy of Education (Final year, University of Dundee)

Yimou Huang: How to Touch Nature? A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Taoism and Western Ecofeminism (final Year, University of Dundee)

Heather Maycock: Rehearsing Death: A Cultural Analysis of Death in Video Games (2^nd year, University of Dundee)

Monica Dritschel: More and Less: Approaching Nothingness through Indefinable Artistic Practices (2^nd year, University of Dundee)

Haorui Yu: VULCA: Cross-Cultural Multimodal AI Evaluation for Art Understanding (2^nd year, University of Dundee)

Domenica Landin: Towards Multispecies Competencies in Collaborations Beyond the Human (2^nd year, University of Dundee)

 

Publications