Team

Jack is a Research Associate at the Creative Economies Lab, where he plays a central role in researching and evaluating the Bristol+Bath Creative R+D programme and the Grounding Technologies programme.

He is a cultural geographer whose research at UWE Bristol has centred upon the interaction between creative industries and place-based economic policy.

In tandem with his academic research, Jack is a designer of games and interactive narrative experiences. His creative practice and recently-completed PhD project explore how people engage with place through playful, site-specific, experimental and immersive media forms.

Jack is an active committee member of the Digital Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers), where he is also an Associate Fellow.

Tarek is working on a number of large research projects examining creative industries clusters in the south west of England and beyond. Currently, he is working on Bristol+ Bath Creative R+D (including the Creative Workforce for the Future project) as well as legacy planning for the South West Creative Technology Network (SWCTN). Previously he was part Founder and Deputy Director of Network: Queen Mary University of London’s Centre for the Creative and Cultural Economy. Network was partly a legacy of Creativeworks London, which was a large knowledge exchange hub, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2012 and 2016. There, Tarek conducted research into knowledge exchange practices, creative SMEs, creative clusters, and creative hubs – where he has published extensively.

Melissa works on the Research England-funded South West Creative Technology Network (SWCTN), which supports creative technologists across the South West. SWCTN run funded research and prototype programmes, supporting thinkers and makers to do what they love and create new work and businesses. She’s currently producing the data strand of the programme: www.swctn.org.uk/data

Having studied human rights law at postgraduate level, she spent 10 years working as a documentary filmmaker specialising in oral history, worked in feature film development, and was for three years CEO of a modern slavery charity. She is interested in how people in the creative economies can develop new ways of working, producing and leading, develop themselves and their teams and drive meaningful social change.

Jon Dovey is Emeritus Professor of Screen Media at UWE Brisotl. He was the Director of Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, SWCTN, REACT, and many other projects. He founded the Digital Cultures Research Centre in 2008 and was its director until 2012. An artist as well as academic, he worked with video as a writer, editor and researcher in broadcast TV for the first half of his career, and co-founded original scratch artists Gorilla Tapes in 1984, exhibiting internationally for ten years. He works in theory and practice in technology and cultural form.

Liz Roberts is Senior Research Fellow for Bristol+Bath Creative R+D and the South West Creative Technologies Network, where she focuses on evaluation of the programmes. Liz is a cultural geographer who has worked at the intersection of social science and arts and humanities across a range of interdisciplinary projects. Her research has centred around cultural industries and digital policy (specifically in the rural context), visual and creative methods, science communication and climate change, resilience and wellbeing, film analysis and storytelling.

Simon is Associate Professor of Creative Economies at UWE Bristol and leads the lab.

He is the director of the multi-million pound Bristol and Bath Creative R&D part of AHRC’s Creative Industries Cluster Programme (CICP). Our work has focussed on supporting sustainable, inclusive, and responsible R&D in the creative sector. He is also chair the AHRC Monitoring and Evidence Working Group, hosting a national conversation about the impacts of the CICP.

He leads Fair Creative Economies, a project to explore ethical ways of organising in the creative economy. This is part of the £30M MyWorld (UKRI Strength in Places Fund) programme led by University of Bristol. He is part of MyWorld’s ‘Observatory’ which coordinates evidence about our impact on the region’s economy, and sit on the Senior Mangement board.

He is also an artist​ and author, drawing and writing about everyday life, focusing on the geographies and histories of memory, and our relationship to the landscape.