I am a Knowledge Content Producer (multimedia) at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). In response to the Grenfell Tower Disaster and ICE's 'In Plain Sight' report, our team has been tasked with delivering the organisation's updated education programme through a mixture of lectures, podcasts, videos and written learning packs. Some of our most recent work explores pressing civil engineering topics - from decarbonisation to disaster risk management - with members of SARAID, Grenfell Next of Kin, bridgeUkraine and Transport for London.
I give lectures about media convergence and intercultural communication at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). I have presented talks and sat on panels across a range of institutions - such as: University College London (UCL), Goldsmiths and Birkbeck - as well as at public events, including FOCUS - The Meeting Place for International Production and Bertha DocHouse. I am a member of the Screen Worlds collective, which involves managing the project's website, creating digital content, promoting events and preparing quantitative and qualitative engagement reports for the European Research Council (ERC).
I was previously the Web Editor at The Location Guide (TLG), where I wrote 100s of web pieces about the media production sector, interviewed international filmmakers and promoted TLG's business conference FOCUS. I was also the Locations Editor of the company's b2b publication makers magazine, writing an array of features and proofreading the final copy for the Cannes 2022 and FOCUS 2021 editions.
My work (journalistic and academic) has featured in a variety of international publications, including: The Location Guide, makers magazine, the LMGI's Compass, Screen Worlds, ICE News and Insight, Black Camera, and MSMI (Music, Sound, and the Moving Image). I studied at UCL and SOAS; my masters thesis won the SOAS School of Arts Postgraduate Dissertation Prize, and I was awarded a three-year PhD research scholarship. I successfully defended my PhD thesis by viva voce examination with no revisions or corrections. I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).
My first book, which is forthcoming as part of Bloomsbury's New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media series, draws from my doctoral research. The thesis - 'Kahlil Joseph, New Media and the Audiovisual Atlantic: Music and Moving Images between Africa, America and Europe' - examined the films, music videos, advertisements and installations of filmmaker Kahlil Joseph.
This pioneering, interdisciplinary director has collaborated with musicians Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, FKA Twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha, Shabazz Palaces and Shafiq Husayn as well as fashion labels KENZO and Vans, generating transcultural digital media forms that resist neat and simplistic categorisations and, in turn, subvert the underlying Eurocentricity on which Western notions of modernity are grounded.
I term the phenomenon - where music, sounds and moving images from Africa, America and Europe collide and offer alternative constructions of modernity - the Audiovisual Atlantic, building on Paul Gilroy's seminal work The Black Atlantic (1993).