Specialisms:  Academic Leadership and Creative Learning, Vision and Strategy Development, Change Management, Stakeholder Engagement and Partnership Building, Curriculum Innovation, Design, Delivery and Evaluation

Based in Los Angeles, Christy is a versatile, strategic, and collaborative leader in the arts, with an ever-present commitment to visioning, developing, and implementing creative programmes that have cultural, social, and community impact across local, national, and global contexts. Skilled in working across strategy and operations, for-profit institutions and nonprofit organisations, and private and public sector enterprises, with a core focus on partnership building, research, knowledge exchange, and civic engagement.

Over two decades, Christy has occupied executive and senior leadership roles across shifting higher education landscapes, gaining the skills necessary to lead creative and academic communities through cultural and structural change. The roles have included: Vice Principal Academic at Plymouth College of Art in Devon, UK; Professor and Chair of the Art Department at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, USA; and Principal Lecturer and Associate Dean, School of Fine Arts at University for the Creative Arts in Kent, UK.

Her background is in contemporary fine art with knowledge and experience of working within higher education, art in the public realm, and establishing links with local, regional, and international partners for creative collaborations. Leading development of academic programmes over the years, it has been her priority to embed within the curriculum an active and committed involvement with the cultural and creative economy, as well as socially engaged practices.

An artist, committed educator, and academic leader Christy is interested in exploring expanded notions of curriculum, and how innovative frameworks enable independent learning within communities of practice. She is engaged with curricular and co-curricular initiatives that drive 21st century pedagogy, embedding practices that have contemporary relevance, and an engagement with the real world. She has extensive knowledge and experience working with learning structures and methodologies in relationship to quality, management, and enhancement contexts with this being an integral part of her academic leadership. 

Christy’s practice-based research is interdisciplinary and includes artists’ books, public art commissions, installation works and museum intervention. She has chosen to work beyond the context of the gallery by exploring new platforms, contexts, and sites, as well as relationships to diverse audiences. She has received numerous research grant awards, most notably from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK for the project FEAST, which was launched at the UCR California Museum of Photography and was featured in Vertigo Magazine, Source, Afterimage, Photography & Culture, and more recently in The Photography Cultures Reader: Representation, Agency and Identity edited by Liz Wells (Routledge, 2019).

Most recently, Christy has been working freelance on numerous international collaborations and educational initiatives. She has been serving as Charity Trustee and Non-Executive Director for KARST since 2018, which is Plymouth’s largest independent contemporary arts venue, and a platform for conceptually diverse arts which embed and advocate experimentation, innovation and risk-taking.