DCDC23 keynote speakers
Dr. Sam Salem
PRiSM lecturer in composition, Royal Northern College of Music
Sam Salem is a British/Jordanian composer who creates works for performers, electronics and video. His award-winning electroacoustic works have been performed at festivals and concert series around the world. He is a founding member and co-artistic director of Distractfold ensemble, which was the first British ensemble to receive the Kranichstein Music Prize for Interpretation from Internationales Musikinstitute Darmstadt in 2014. He is also PRiSM lecturer in composition at the Royal Northern College of Music.
Prof. Kate Elswit
Head of digital research and professor of performance and technology, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London
Kate Elswit is a scholar–artist whose research on performing bodies combines dance history, performance theory, cultural studies, medical humanities, experimental practice, and technology. For the past decade, she has been collaborating with Harmony Bench to bring dance and the experimental digital humanities into conversation, including the AHRC-funded projects Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data (2022-25) and Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (2018-22), which won the ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship. Her print publications include the award-winning books Watching Weimar Dance (2014) and Theatre And Dance (2018).
Dr. Daniela Petrelli
Professor of interaction design at the Art and Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University
Dr Daniela Petrelli is director of the Digital Materiality Lab at the Art and Design Research Centre, an interest group looking into new digital-material hybrids. She started working on new technologies for cultural heritage in 1996 designing the first context-sensitive personalised interactive mobile guide. She recently led the European project meSch that explored tangible and embodied interactions in museums and heritage sites. She has also published over 100 international peer-reviewed contributions and received 12 awards both from academia and industry.
Ojoma Ochai
Cofounder and managing partner, Creative Economy Practice at CcHUB
Ojoma Ochai is a respected thought leader and strategist in the creative economy space, with over 17 years of experience working on high-impact projects with renowned organisations and national governments. She has led CcHUB to become a prominent player in driving value creation and technology application in Africa's creative economies through its comprehensive suite of research, advocacy, ecosystem development, investment readiness, and investor advocacy / education programs. Her participation on the 42 member UNESCO Global Expert Panel on the 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions underscores her influence and expertise in global Creative Economy initiatives and policy.
Dr. Chiara Zuanni
Assistant professor, University of Graz
Chiara Zuanni is a museology focused assistant professor in digital humanities at the Centre for Information Modelling, University of Graz, Austria. She studied classics and archaeology in Italy prior to moving to the UK, where she obtained a PhD in museology at the University of Manchester and worked as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liverpool and in the research department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Since 2018, she has been in Graz as a local principal investigator for the Erasmus+ project DigiCulture and for the Horizon 2020 project ReInHerit, and for a DARIAH Theme project on contemporary collecting and the pandemic. Her research focuses on the construction of knowledge in museums with digital media, data practices in cultural heritage, and questions of digital curation and sustainability.
Prof. Claire Warwick
Professor of digital humanities, Durham University
Claire Warwick is professor of digital humanities in the Department of English at Durham University, having been pro-vice-chancellor of research from 2014 to 2019. Her research is concerned with the way that digital resources are used in the humanities and cultural heritage and in reading behaviour in physical and digital spaces. She has led and co-investigated digital humanities research projects and has served on numerous advisory boards, including the British Library’s BL Labs and Project Biblissima. She was the UK representative on the Comité Scientifique du Campus Condorcet in Paris and chaired the humanities panel for the research evaluation exercise at the University of Helsinki.