Until recently I worked for more than a decade as a university lecturer and before then as an artist-practitioner in community, museum, and school settings. I have observed time and again that artists and visionaries need to feel they have permission to do what they do—and when they cultivate this for themselves, the magic happens.I am also an artist myself, and while I draw on this to give professional advice, the tools I have developed to nourish my creativity and resilience come from the experience of overwork and overwhelm that led to a migraine that lasted nearly 10 months and chronic headache problems for the next five years.Everything in my life seemed to feed the pain—my ambition, all the toxic feelings around work I was carrying, the numerous ways I was limiting myself through my mindset. It was a negative spiral. I felt professionally invisible and this compounded the physical pain, which made me less visible.This was a catalyst moment and since then I have spent time working on methods to handle stress and the precarity of my work life. I developed boundaries and eliminated any people-pleasing. I have learned to say what I need in order to feel safe, secure, and able to flourish. I concentrated on giving myself permission to feel and I rejected the cliched narratives of a frustrated artist. It opened up space for my own joy and pleasure in my practice, to reframe what a practice might look like.Since sharing these insights in my friendships and mentoring relationships I have empowered others to feel more confident in the work they do and have a range of practical tools to draw on when they wobble. And then I realised, it's time to share my insights more broadly, and take my mentoring work seriously.

I weave together audio, texts, archival and found materials with photographs and performances to interrogate the slippery multi-faceted performance of femininity. I want to bring to light, the contradictions in physical bodily display and the divergent techniques of hiding in plain sight—being the dazzling spectacle in the spotlight. Hyper-visible and invisible, loud and voiceless. Such spotlight moments in my work draw attention to the crafting of identity through entertainment. Revealing the layers of identity informed by social interaction and contexts. I uncover hidden mechanisms and staged moments, through a process of bringing in expert voices, building unlikely relationships with retired chorus girls, current showgirls and contrary performers, who play along with me, committing to a period of embarrassed rehearsals and the ritual humiliation of public performance.I am interested in the labour of the performance, the vulnerability of the body, and the generation of charisma. I often step into these awkward moments, implicating myself and the viewer; dancing non-stop to the threshold of painful exhaustion; singing sincerely but imperfectly in a crowded room. I aim to capture a certain irreverence, absurdity tinged with melancholy, foolishness, pleasure—all these layers of live performance, all at the same time. The long exposures of my photographs of theatre interiors reflect aspiration, opulence and dust. The façade and the real. The reality of construction. These resonant and atmospheric spaces are haunted with the trials of optimism and human endeavour, of putting on a show. I explore theatres as sites of self-actualisation and Hollywood as a site of avant-garde art. Breaching boundaries between showing-off and reflecting, between exhibitionism and our own interior worlds, I position the night as a world to be inhabited, reclaimed, and enjoyed.Viewing Pleasure and Being A Showgirl, was published by Routledge, 2018

Studio teaching with first year BA (Hons) Contemporary Art and Contemporary Art & Illustration students. Also leading workshops and assessing.

In October 2016 I qualified as an Introductory Level Iyengar yoga teacher. I teach regularly at Zag Yoga and occasionally at the Sheffield Iyengar Yoga Centre.

My work includes: studio teaching (crits, tutorials, workshops), art context lectures, dissertation supervision and marking, chairing Transmission lectures, as well as photography and performance workshops on BA (Hons) Fine Art as an Associate Lecturer. I have also covered module leading.Within Media Arts and Communications I've worked on the modules Celebrity Culture, Communicating Sex & Gender, Moral Panics, and Media Audiences: leading seminar groups and marking essays and presentations. I also supervise and mark dissersations.

Teaching on BA (Hons) Fine Art as part of funded PhD. Undertook a range of teaching activities: weekly critiques, student pastoral care, one-to-one tutorials, dissertation supervision and marking, leading seminars, lectures on Art & The Body, chairing artist lectures as part of the Transmission series, workshops in live art and photography including wet darkroom, studio lighting, documenting artwork and documenting live art.

Teaching Assistant for Ellen Birrell, David Bunn, Darcy Hemley.For classes in Visual Semiotics, Site Specificity and Medium Format cameras & studio photography respectively.

Summer job working on b.TWEEN 08 as part of marketing team.

Developed and administered associate membership scheme for artist-run studios with curated project space. Raised ACE funding for trip to the Netherlands for associates.

Managed the running of the premises, including rent collection, recording keeping and accounting. Also produced publicity material and reports. Completed feasibility study looking at the potential to deliver art activities in the corporate sector, funded by Arts Council, England.

Liased with students, academics, new applicants, the wider administration team so that courses ran efficiently (MA Film Studies, MA Media Studies & MA Film and Media Production).