King's College London

You describe GLOW-in-a-BOX as “the world’s first touring exhibition platform that addresses underrepresentation in creative technology.” Could you break this down: what can audiences expect to encounter?

GLOW-in-a-BOX is a social venture emerging from academic research into gender diversity in creative technology at the moments of new technological innovation. Based on 140 interviews with gender diverse creators, producers, curators, professionals, the research was published in the book: Mixed Realities, Gender and Emergent Media, which received an honourable mention in the ranking of best monograph of 2026 by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.

I was subsequently awarded an AHRC fellowship and developed a six-week exhibition ‘GLOW: Illuminating Innovation’ accompanied by a public programme across multiple locations in Strand/Aldwych, London launching on International Women’s Day in 2024. The programme showcased some of the stories featured in the interviews of hidden technological innovation, primarily by women, that been erased from history or occluded by subsequent stories of male founders.

GLOW exhibited digital art, using immersive technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. It had three strands: it showcased historical contributions: legacy artworks from across the decades of different developments; it included brand new commissions: premieres of 4 never-before-seen artworks; and recent Virtual Reality works that had been created in the last 12 to 24 months, curated by Liz Rosenthal of Venice Immersive.

At what point did you realise GLOW-in-a-BOX had the potential to exist beyond a one‑off public programme?

As a research-funded project, the GLOW: Illuminating Innovation exhibition was a one-off at the time. But tracking audience reactions, and the impact on the artists that were involved, as well as the wider sector and communities, we received overwhelming feedback that this had been a really important and much-needed intervention that should happen regularly. People came to London from all over the UK to see the exhibition and were saying: wouldn’t this be wonderful if this were happening in my town or city? So, the idea emerged to develop GLOW from the original exhibition into GLOW-in-a-BOX: a social venture to tour around the UK or globally.

How central was this social mission to the creation of GLOW‑in‑a‑BOX?

First and foremost, I recognised that there is no recurring gender specific platform for this type of work, and that there is crucial a need for this in the tech sector, which has a critical a lack of gender diversity.

Both Mixed Realities and GLOW: Illuminating Innovation demonstrated that there is gender diversity in creative technology and tech spaces at their point of emergence. The problem is the systemic erasure of, and lack of foregrounding, of those artists, creators, and inventors. I wanted to develop and evolve that space, to move towards a more equitable representation in the creative technology sector.

Alongside this, there is the recognition that it's a real challenge to exhibit digital artworks. Cultural venues, museums, galleries and so on, don't always have the resources or the capacity to understand how best to integrate digital art works into their exhibitions. And there is a demand for touring exhibitions that bring this expertise and this work.

GLOW-in-a-BOX offers a modularised approach for a venue to commission a touring exhibition with all the technical and curatorial support to integrate this into their programming and physical spaces.

GLOW-in-a-BOX emerged to address these two needs identified through market validation and market research.

Once it was clear that there was demand to sustain and grow GLOW-in-a-BOX, how did you go about creating a social venture from it?

Just after GLOW: Illuminating Innovation finished in 2024, I attended a King’s Innovation Catalyst talk about the ARC Accelerator programme. I then went onto enrol in their ARC Discover and Launch programmes, and then worked alongside Monique Liddar in King’s Innovation Catalyst to develop a trademark application for GLOW and GLOW-in-a-BOX. From feedback received both during and after the exhibition, it was clear that GLOW had established a strong, recognisable brand. In 2025, I was successful in my application for ARC Accelerate a six-month programme, with funding for my time to develop the venture. While I had heard the term ‘social venture,’ I had never really considered it as an opportunity to pursue, because I had never considered commercialisation as a route for my research work. But I became very interested in how you can work within a commercial framework in order to realise social change ambitions. Moving into the domain of entrepreneurship has been really fascinating. It’s a whole new world and language, which I hadn’t engaged with in an applied way before, only at a conceptual, theoretical level as an academic.

What is next for GLOW-in-a-BOX?

ARC Accelerate was all about developing the funding pitch, the cash flow model and the profile of GLOW-in-a-BOX. The next stage is to move on to the legal aspects - registering at Companies House; setting up the legal framework and contracting, and so on. For GLOW: Illuminating Innovation, I was supported by colleagues from King’s Culture, King’s Digital Lab and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, but when GLOW-in-a-BOX is set up as a stand-alone company, I would need to make appointments in production, project management and marketing. This next phase will be supported by a SPARK Innovation award from King’s Innovation Catalyst. The touring exhibition for GLOW-in-a-BOX will initially launch in London later in 2026, and travel to more venues in locations across the UK.