Organising & Steering Committee Bios

Mark Dunford is an academic, practitioner and researcher whose research interests explore questions of voice and representation in participatory media. He is a director of DigiTales, a research and production company hosted by the Institute of Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths College, University of London and also works as an academic developer at Morley College, London.  He has held senior academic roles at Goldsmiths, University of Brighton and the University of East London and his creative sector experience includes time at BBC, British Film Institute and Arts Council England.  He chairs the Steering Group which oversees the biennial International Visual Methods Conference.

Camelia Crisan has an extensive experience in development, both organizational and at community level. Since 2022 she is the CEO of Progress Foundation, the Romanian NGO coordinating over 250 coding clubs in rural areas. Previously she has managed the training component of the Biblionet program in Romania, overseeing the development of more than 5000 trainers, directors, head of departments, rural librarians, and community members. Biblionet was a 26.9 million USD worth program funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

She has done numerous research projects in digital storytelling, corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, sustainability, and technology. She has delivered also training courses for corporations and public institutions to prepare them for sustainable practices. Among them, she looked at correlating the citizens’ view on climate change with their personal cultural values and a methodology for measuring the social return on investment. Dr Crisan is a Senior Lecturer at SNSPA, Bucharest, Romania, holds a PhD in Sociology, a BA in Communication Science, and a BA in Psychology. She also delivers at SNSPA, within the College of Communication and Public Relations, the courses on Digital Storytelling, Leadership and Organizational Design Thinking.

Daniela Gachago is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Innovation for Learning and Teaching (CILT) at the University of Cape Town. Her current research focuses on academic staff development for designing blended and online learning in higher education, with a particular focus on developing socially just learning and curriculum designs based on co-creation and equity-oriented compassionate design principles. She teaches on the PG Diploma in EdTech, the Masters in EdTech and the Masters in Higher Education Studies (HES) at UCT. She completed a Masters in Adult Education at the University of Botswana and received a PHD from the School of Education at the University of Cape Town. She is a C1-rated researcher and 2022 Fulbright Scholar who has published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is the managing editor of CriSTaL, the journal for critical studies in teaching and learning in higher education. She blogs at http://danielagachago.blogspot.com and tweets under @dgachago17

Terence Heng is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of four books, including Visual Methods in the Field (Routledge 2016), Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces (Routledge 2020) and Diasporas, Weddings and the Trajectories of Ethnicity (Routledge 2020). His research ambulates through the intersections of cultural geography, visual sociology and photographic practice, investigating diasporic Chinese identities, sacred space-making amongst Chinese Singaporeans, and visual methods. Terence is the inaugural winner of the International Visual Sociology Association’s Prosser Award for Outstanding Visual Methodologies, and 2016 winner of the Sociological Review’s annual prize for best journal article.

Chris High is a Lecturer in Peace and Development at Linnaeus University in Sweden.  He works with participatory visual methods, such as participatory video and digital storytelling, in teaching, research and community engagement. He convened the International Visual Methods Steering group from 2013 to 2017, and has supported training and capacity building in participatory video for researchers and practitioners in Europe, Africa, India and Australia. Current work focuses on social issues around the integration of refugees and migrants in Sweden, supporting teachers in higher education to use visual methods in online teaching and a project with universities in Central Asia to incorporate sustainability into the teaching of agriculture and food production.

Sabrina Lucibello Architect, Phd and Professor in Industrial Design. President of the Bachelor Degree Course in Design and Director of the Centre for Research and Services Saperi&co of Sapienza University of Rome. The line of research developed over the years has involved theoretical and applied research, with themes related to product innovation and technology transfer of materials and processes with a particular approach aimed at enhancing the sensory characteristics and synaesthetic perception of materials for product design.

Rebecca Noone (she/her) is an artist and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Information Studies, University College London (UCL). She is the Associate Director of UCL’s Center for Digital Humanities and a visiting researcher at the Forum on Information Literacy. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. Situated in the areas of critical information studies and feminist media studies, Rebecca’s research focuses on the politics, discourses, and practices of digital mapping and locative media. She is the author of Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps, published by Routledge (exp. 2024).

Federica Pesce co-founder and head of the Storytelling Area of Melting Pro (www.meltingpro.org) , she designs and coordinates national and international cultural initiatives related to the development of skills and territorial regeneration on a cultural basis. Her challenge is to transform information into knowledge, through the use of narrative techniques and practices related to social design, in order to activate participatory processes and tell about territories and their heritages. PhD in Arts Design and New Technologies at La Sapienza University of Rome, she is a lecturer of sociology of communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata and at ISIA in Pescara.

Lorena Trebbi is a Post-Doctoral Researcher and Adjunct Professor in Design at the Department of Planning, Design, and Technology of Architecture of Sapienza University of Rome, where she attained the title of Doctor Europaeus/PhD in 2021. She carries out her researches in the field of innovative materials for design, focusing in particular on biodesign and biofabrication and the opportunity of implementing symbiotic processes between nature and culture, design and science, through which rethinking the parasitic relationship we humans established with the planetary ecosystem and the other species and life forms who inhabit it.

Dawn Woolley is an artist and research fellow at Leeds Arts University. She completed an MA in Photography (2008) and PhD by project in Fine Art (2017) at the Royal College of Art. Recent publications include: Consuming the Body: Capitalism, Social Media and Commodification, London: Bloomsbury, 2023; “The Quantified Self, The Ideology of Health and Fat”, in The Body Productive, London: Bloomsbury, 2023; and “The Dissecting Gaze: Fashioned Bodies on Social Networking Sites”, in Revisiting the Gaze: Feminism, Fashion and the Female Body, London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include; “Consumed: Stilled Lives” bildkultur Gallery, Stuttgart, (2022), Perth Centre for Photography, Australia, (2021), and Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds (2019); and “Visual Pleasure”, Hippolyte Photography Gallery, Helsinki, Finland (2013), Vilniaus Fotografijos Galerija, Lithuania (2012).