The Global Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Angela's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
About Angela
Dr Angela Piccini is Programme Lead for the BA Fine Art and is UoA32 REF Coordinator in the School of Art, Design and Architecture.
Angela's work is inspired by writer Donna Haraway to 'stay with the trouble' of the traces of the past in the present. Combining archaeological imaginaries and speculative futures, her practice works with archives, found materials, and memory to explore place, land, belonging, exclusion and the potential of process and practice to produce new, imagined, and real places.
Angela has specific interests in contested urban spaces and spatial practice, co-creation, and practice-as-research. Her research spans histories of urban video art and their relationships with port planning and infrastructure; participatory, social practice and co-produced moving image projects that engage with critical questions of heritage and society; digital technologies and moving image archives; mega event screen infrastructures and their entanglement with cultural heritage.
Angela's story begins in Vancouver, Canada – the unceded, shared territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tseil-Waututh) nations. Her parents came to Vancouver from Chile and Italy. She is a first-generation academic with a long-standing commitment to interdisciplinary, intermedial and cross-sector research through peer-reviewed scholarship and through social practice, performance and the moving image.
What connects Angela's research and teaching activities is her turning a critical lens across all materials and media involved in the making, circulating, consuming and subverting of narrative in order to investigate how narrative itself becomes a medium for material transformation.
Never having been taught about the importance of 'discipline' until it was too late, Angela remains unapologetically interdisciplinary. Her return to Fine Art after journeys across (with a nod to Mieke Bal) Archaeology, Geography, Heritage, Film, Screen Media, and Performance illustrates a centring of attentions to place, material sensitivity, aesthetics, politics, and a bit of tricksterism.
Before working in academia, Angela worked as a janitor, a college radio DJ, an archivist, a librarian, a cook, and a publications officer for Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments where she commissioned photography, design, and print for guidebooks and postcards.
Supervised Research Degrees
Director of Studies
Desmond Beach: Black Joy: The Path to Healing Our Hearts, Our Minds, Our Bodies, and Our Souls in the Face of Racialized Trauma
Duncan Cameron: The Shock of the Old: The Use of Anachronistic Museological Display Methodologies in the Presentation of the Natural and Artefactual within Visual Arts Practice
Megan Curet: En Ritmo: Praxis in Decolonizing Traditional Dance Spaces
David Harbott: The Biotic Subject: On Becoming More Than Human
Donna Kukama: Ways-of-Remembering-Existing: Performance Art as an Unknowing Vocabulary for (Writing Histories) Memory Work
Polly Rayner-Woodrow: The Box/UoP Collaborative Doctoral Award: Decolonising the Cottonian Collection
Cam Williamson: Socially engaged social realist painting and the Queer District Collective
2nd Supervisor
Emma Bush: Memoir, Materiality and the Intimate Encounter
As member of staff at University of Bristol, supervisor to completion:
2020, Co-supervisor, Will Finch, Sound and music in the BBC’s Arena documentary series, PhD
2020, Primary Supervisor, Molly Niu, Digital visual effects in contemporary Hollywood cinema aesthetics, networks and transnational practice, PhD
2018, Member of supervisory Committee, Greg Bond, Co-producing Spaces of Descent, practice-based PhD
2018, Primary Supervisor, Vesna Lukic, The River Danube as a Holocaust Landscape: Journey of the Kladovo Transport, practice-based PhD
2017, Primary supervisor, Greg Bailey, Soundings, practice-based PhD
2016, Primary supervisor, Laura Aish, A practice-based exploration of authenticity, found footage and structural filmmaking, MPhil
2016, Primary supervisor, Yuyu Zhang, A practice-based exploration of expanded cinema and site-specificity, MPhil
2013, Co-supervisor, Sy Taffel, Digital Media Ecologies, PhD
Teaching
As programme lead for the BA in Fine Art, Angela teaches across all undergraduate modules. She also teaches into the Architecture and Film programmes.
