Lead Researcher
Vanessa Bartlett
Vanessa is a curator and researcher who explores links between technology and wellbeing. Her exhibitions at international arts spaces, such as FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), UNSW Galleries and Furtherfield, have been seen by over 40,000 people and have featured in The Guardian, Creative Review and BBC Radio 4. She has edited two books for award-winning academic publisher Liverpool University Press. Vanessa has lived with various gastrointestinal complaints since 2004. www.vanessabartlett.com
Network Co-Leader
Rachel Marsden
Rachel Marsden is a curator, researcher and educator interested in practice-based research, inclusive pedagogies and ethics of care. This work is informed by her practice in arts and health, social prescribing and lived experience of chronic illness and disability. Alongside freelance roles, she is Associate Lecturer in Practice-based Research at University of the Arts London (UAL); Regional Champion for the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance (UK), and a member of the International Association of Arts Critics (AICA). As an arts writer, she has recently written for Elephant, Manchester International Festival 2021 and Frieze, with book chapters in publications by National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and Sternberg Press.
Collaborating Researchers
Chamara Basnayake
Chamara completed his physician and gastroenterology training at Monash Health and St Vincent’s hospital. He completed his PhD in the multidisciplinary treatment of functional gut disorders at the University of Melbourne and undertook an overseas research fellowship at the translational research in gastrointestinal disorders unit at KU Leuven in oesophageal dysmotility. Chamara runs the oesophageal physiology laboratory and the multidisciplinary functional gut disorders clinic at St Vincent’s Hospital. Chamara’s research interests are in microbiota in inflammatory bowel disease, functional gut disorders, oesophageal motility disorders and eosinophilic oesophagitis.
Lindsay Kelley
Working in the kitchen, Lindsay Kelley’s art practice and scholarship explore how the experience of eating changes when technologies are being eaten. She is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design, College of the Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University. Her first book, Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience (London: IB Tauris, 2016), considers the kitchen as a site of knowledge production for art and science. The recipient of an Australia Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2019-2021), she has exhibited and performed internationally, and her published work can be found in journals including parallax, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Angelaki, and Environmental Humanities.
Julianne Bell
Julianne is an interdisciplinary arts researcher, with an interest in applying data driven, digital research techniques to support humanities and social science (HASS) research projects. She is currently finishing her PhD in Cultural Materials Conservation at the University of Melbourne, working on an ARC Linkage Project, PolyMuse. Julianne’s PhD investigates survey, documentation and data analysis methodologies to improve the management and preservation of plastic-based cultural heritage objects in Australian museum collections, and has recently published journal articles in Heritage Science and Studies in Conservation.