Creative Practice and Theory
Creative Practice and Theory includes staff from the School of Creative Arts.
Discover what it’s like to work in the School of Creative Arts.
Thank you for your interest in joining the School of Creative Arts.
We are a creative community with a deep commitment to our staff, students and the places around us. Our staff are highly motivated individuals who excel in their industry, research and pedagogic practice. Although very individual, they are thinkers and disruptors, influencing our students to do the same and agitate toward a better future.
This is an inclusive and collegial team of creators, writers and performers with big ambitions and a passion that extends beyond the classroom. We see a great deal of potential around us and have a vision that builds on the significant cultural heritage in Gloucestershire. We want to promote the region as a destination for the creative audience, towards a place that our graduates and staff will want to call home and to make and create in a supportive environment.
Our institution has embraced its creative provision in the recent University structure, giving us a strong voice and support for our vision. This gives us confidence in our future both in the University and beyond. We invite agitators and creative thinkers to join us on this exciting journey.
Prof. Angus Pryor
Head of School
We are a dynamic and progressive school at the heart of the University with a comprehensive teaching and research portfolio.
Our campuses are located across Cheltenham and Gloucester, with multiple connections in the region and beyond. Our students are award winners, both in the UK and internationally – we are incredibly proud of them and their achievements.
We don’t like to limit our work to a list of subjects.
Our courses have strong internal and external connections and we encourage you to collaborate, explore new possibilities and question the boundaries of your chosen field.
We will support you in your journey through opportunities to engage in postgraduate study, research projects or mentoring within our creative community.
We will give you time and space to develop your practice with technologies that are relevant to your field. We are keen to embrace digital approaches that enable staff and students to perform at the highest level.
We will invest in your pedagogic practice, enabling you to develop excellence in our students and to inspire bold and creative thinking.
We encourage our staff to remain connected to academia and the creative sector to inform their teaching practice and create opportunities for our students.
We are committed to preparing our students for the next stages of their careers through our carefully designed curriculum, established network of industry partners, and a range of extra-curricular opportunities.
We take great pride in our research and see so much potential in our creative community.
Our key priority is working with our Early Career Researchers and underrepresented groups. We want to help them articulate their unique perspectives with boldness to agitate and push the boundaries of creative learning.
REF 2021 solidified our focus and gave us confidence to continue to pioneer practice as research.
We are excited to see the development of new and innovative projects from colleagues.
Image: Katharina Hoerath & Katie Donahue’s ‘Pillars and Petals’ installation at London Design Fair playing with ideas of architectural cycles and scales.
We are committed to developing our staff through training, mentoring and opportunities to take part in exciting initiatives.
If you are a creative practitioner with strong expertise and a desire to contribute to the team and wider school, please email [email protected].
Discover the benefits of working at UoG and view available vacancies.
Hear from our staff about their experience working within the School of Creative Arts.
Dr Yvette Putra
Lecturer in Architecture
Research-led teaching
“My research informs my teaching, to affirm the instrumentality of architectural artifacts as human records and adopt global and critical perspectives of culture, geography, and temporality – to, ultimately, challenge the longstanding Eurocentrism of architectural design, history, and practice.”
“In my past research, I have confronted how aspects of Australian history, such as Indigenous genocide and racist immigration laws, are evidenced through architectural drawings. I have also analysed how immigrant encounters of the Australian suburban house are communicated through models by the architect and artist Alex Selenitsch.”
“My ongoing research disentangles, from the peripheries of architectural discourse, non-Occidentalised techniques of architectural representation – such as in Chinese grave goods, East Asian handscrolls, and Indian miniatures – and advances their integration into current architectural pedagogy and practice.”
“I apprise my students of the uniquely twenty-first-century context in which we operate – with myriad people and places, with cultures ancestral and emerging, with sites on our doorstep and on the other side of the planet. The world is a dazzling babel of opportunities. Hence, it demands commensurately compassionate, reflective, and sustained colloquy, and my goal is for students to become adaptive, cognizant, and ethical professionals – for, without such underpinning, even the finest scholarship is meaningless.”
“I teach with an awareness of minority knowledges and marginalised voices. For example, in Australian architecture, I refer to the histories of Indigenous Australians, convicts, and women, which are frequently circumvented and perverted. And I broaden the curriculum to engage with art, architecture, and urbanism on a global scale – I can confidently declare that my teaching embraces every continent except for Antarctica.”
“Equity and safety are embedded into my practices and maintained as standards in my classroom. This empowers students, particularly those from origins that preclude them from being heard, such as female students from patriarchal societies and students from censorial regimes.”
“Giving each student a voice nurtures their sense of self and is an immediate and rich demonstration of the human-centered values to which we aspire. I believe that equity – affording us the right to be heard – unlocks the door to freedom of expression, but it is safety – assuring us we can speak without fear – that opens it.”
Susie Olczak
Multidisciplinary artist, researcher and lecturer in Fine Art.
“The University of Gloucestershire has supported my early-career research with two field trips to attend residencies in Latin America with La Wakaya Current. I was able to travel to go to the Armila in the Darién Gap in Panama to a coastal rainforest setting where I was hosted by the Guna community and to Coyo in the Atacama Desert in Chile with the Lickan Antay community. The funding also allowed me to offset the carbon of the trips which had an ecological focus.”
“I was able to learn about how two indigenous communities have adapted to extreme climatic environments in one very wet and one very dry area of the world in order to think about more hopeful adaptations in light of the climate emergency through my practice-based research in both locations.”
“This research forms a key part of my PhD and the fundng has alowed for disseminated to date at conferences in the UK, Sweden, Portugal and Latvia and through exhibitions in Chile, Panama and around the UK. It will also be disseminated in a journal article to be published this year in the Folklore Society Special Edition, in Collaboration with Dan Keech from the CCRI. ”
Cat Mogford
Lecturer in design
“Year after year, our students are awarded a huge number of prestigious design awards. In 2022, they claimed 28. In 2023, it was 31. As their teaching staff, we feel incredibly proud and lucky to work with such fantastic students and to be supported by our school in ways that enable us to line up as many opportunities as possible for our cohorts.”
“These opportunities also directly enhance our students’ employability, meaning each year the vast majority of our students either have a creative job lined up in their second or third year of study, ready for when they graduate, or are employed within a few months of finishing the course.”
Katharina Hoerath
Senior Lecturer in Architecture
Engagement with local council
“For my first-semester architectural design project, I chose a site in Cheltenham that holds significance for the local council—a recent development focused on activating a specific area within the city.”
“The task assigned to students was to conceptualize a cultural pavilion adjacent to Cheltenham’s oldest architectural landmark, Minster St. Mary’s. Recognizing the site’s importance, I arranged for Councillor Rowena Hay to participate in a class session, providing students with direct feedback and sharing insights from the design, planning, and construction phases of a real project.”
“This engagement proved invaluable for our first-semester architecture students and marks the initiation of several real-life project experiences integrated into their studies.”
“In the field of architecture, our responsibility extends beyond environmental stewardship to include a social commitment to our designs and constructions.”
“With my guidance, members of the architecture society from UoG collaborated with a local schoolhouse cafe, tasked with generating low-cost design ideas to enhance the space’s appeal, acoustics, and community engagement.”
“Through productive meetings with cafe staff, our student team developed three compelling options, encouraging community involvement in effecting positive change within their neighborhood. ”
“Having previously resided in NYC where I founded my architecture and design firm, I also taught at Parsons University. My enduring connections with experts from NYC and around the world remain robust, with frequent guest lectures conducted via Zoom featuring industry leaders.”
“We have experimented with Zoom critics, connecting our students with another architecture class from University of Colorado. Additionally, we organized a week-long charette where students collaborated to create an eight-meter-long section comprised of 49 different building sections, seamlessly connected at the edges of each student’s drawing. ”