King's College London

Recipients of the 2026 Creative Practice Catalyst Seed Fund include researchers and academics from King's faculties of Arts & Humanities, King’s Business School, Life Sciences & Medicine, Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences, Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience and Social Science & Public Policy. 

The researchers will be working in collaboration with practitioners across theatre, music, film, museums, heritage and creative technologies to develop ideas further and work towards a joint proposal to leverage further external funding. King’s Culture’s Creative Practice Catalyst Seed Fund of up to £5,000 per project will enable these existing interdisciplinary collaborations to spend additional time working together over the coming months.

The projects chosen to receive the seed fund have the potential to advance enquiry in mutually beneficial and equitable ways, to feed into research, build enduring creative relationships into student learning, or to develop knowledge exchange-oriented activity, connecting to the wider societal benefits of existing research.

In addition to the seed funding, recipients will receive the ongoing support and professional guidance of the King's Culture team. 

Arts & Humanities

Clare Carolin, Senior Lecturer Art and Public Engagement, Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries 
with
Tate Liverpool 

Conflict, Troubles and Contemporary Art

This collaboration between King’s College London and Tate will support the development of a research-intensive contemporary visual art exhibition about the conflict in the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland known as the ‘Troubles’ (mid-1960s – 1998) to be presented at Tate Liverpool in 2030.
Despite the ‘Troubles’ protracted nature, deep impact on Irish and British society and significance to contemporary art practices an exhibition about it of this scale and ambition has never been presented in England. This collaboration sets out to correct that absence responding to and engaging audiences from Liverpool, a city with strong ties to Ireland and a shared history of sectarian division.
The Seed Fund will support development of a Subject Specialist Committee of advisors to devise a curatorial framework that supports an equitable and responsible selection of exhibition content and engagement approaches.

Elena Gorfinkel, Reader in Film Studies, Department of Film Studies
with
CorpusFluxus
Restoring Women’s Minor Cinema: Learning from Barbara Loden’s 16mm Educational Films THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE and THE BOY WHO LIKED DEER (1975)

This project considers the lessons that can be learned for feminist film history in the preservation of two 16mm educational films made by independent filmmaker Barbara Loden in the years after her now feminist landmark Wanda (1970). Collaborating with film restorationist Corpus Fluxus/Ross Lipman, who restored Wanda in 2010 at the UCLA Film Archive, this collaboration probes the legacies of women’s work in minor and marginal industries outside of the Hollywood feature film, examining the domain of the educational film field as a harbour for women’s creative labours. The grant will support the work of preliminary digital restoration and colour mapping of faded 16mm extant prints of both films, as well as seeding further fundraising for a complete digital and celluloid restoration, as well as research activities around women’s film work in the long 1970s. 

 

Gabriele Salciute Civiliene, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Department of Digital Humanities
with
Virtigo
Found in Archives, Translated in Extended Reality (XR)

Among many challenges that archives pose to scholars and the wider public alike, access to the meaning and context of a document across time and space is one. This collaboration brings together Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene, Virtigo founder and XR developer Marcel Karnapke, King’s Archives Collection Manager Kate O’Brian and Metadata and Digital Preservation Coordinator Manuela Pallotto Strickland to address the question of ‘difficult’ materials. At the centre of our experimental case study is the memoirs of Field Marshal Lord Ironside, covering the 1921 Cairo Conference, where predominantly British politicians, diplomats and soldiers made decisions that impacted much of the Middle East for decades. We seek to bring this piece into immersive spaces by leveraging Extended Reality and Artificial Intelligence while navigating ethical and technological aspects of embodied encounters with historical memory.

King’s Business School

Heejung Chung, Professor of Work and Employment; Director of Global Institute for Women’s Leadership & Shiyu Yuan,  Research Assistant, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership 
with
Outmost Studio
In His Shoes: A Father’s Day in the Remote-Work Era

A collaborative project between the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) at King’s and award-winning creative studio Outmost. The project explores the lived experiences of working fathers navigating remote work in contemporary UK workplaces. While flexible working is often framed as a solution for work-life balance, many fathers face hidden pressures, stigma, and “always-on” expectations that shape how, when, and whether they use flexibility at all. Through co-design workshops with fathers and the development of early-stage interactive storytelling prototypes, the project will experiment with how branching narratives and visual design can make these invisible tensions tangible and emotionally legible. The aim is to create foundations for an innovative, research-informed interactive tool that can engage employers, policymakers, and the public in rethinking workplace norms around masculinity, flexibility, and gender equality.

Life Sciences & Medicine

Rachel Tribe, Professor of Maternal and Perinatal Sciences & Carlotta Valensin, Research Study Manager, School of Life Course & Population Sciences
with
The Women’s Art Activation System
Creative interventions to support pregnancy after loss or preterm birth

Researchers of the Women and Children’s Health dept. lead by Prof. Rachel Tribe (FoLSM) are collaborating with The Women’s Art Activation System (WAAS) on a new creative-health initiative embedded within the St Thomas’ Hospital Preterm Birth clinic. The project addresses the significant anxiety and emotional trauma often experienced by individuals entering pregnancy after a previous loss or preterm birth -an area where clinical pathways tend to prioritise physical risk but offer limited emotional support. Through co-designed creative workshops, participants will explore drawing, making and reflective practices to reduce stress, build resilience and strengthen connections. Through the development of a creative toolkit for patients (this may include physical materials, digital prompts and reflective video resources), this work lays the foundation for a scalable, research-ready intervention integrating creative practice into evidence-based perinatal care.

Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences

Zoran Cvetković, Professor of Signal Processing, Department of Engineering
with
The Third Orchestra & MagicBeans
Music, Immersion and Space: An investigation into spatial listening and embodied musical experience

This collaboration will explore new ways of performing and experiencing music. The project will develop an original musical work built from performances captured from musicians located across the globe, woven into a single coherent space using advanced spatialisation technologies. 
The work will be designed for presentation through multiple formats, including stereo, binaural, surround, and immersive audio suitable for existing commercial platforms. Alongside these releases, the performance will be reimagined as a free-roam, location-based musical environment. Using real-time spatial audio and tracked headphones, audiences can physically walk through the musical arrangement, encountering virtual performers as embodied experiences rather than from a fixed listening position.
By blending live musicians with these spatially recreated virtual performers, the team is investigating the relationship between liveness and technology, aiming to create a scalable model for touring and a final immersive album release with Naxos Records.

Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience

Johnny Downs, Professor of Child Psychiatry and Health Informatics, Zoë Firth, Research Assistant, Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry & Jessica Penhallow (Programme Manager)
with
Elstree Screen Arts Academy
Research EXPLORED

A pioneering partnership between the CAMHS Digital Lab and Elstree Screen Arts (ESA) Academy is putting young creatives’ voices at the heart of mental health content. The epidemic of children and young people’s mental health is growing – and we need creative solutions to meet the crisis. This is why the CAMHS Digital Lab, a clinical research group at King’s College London that researches children and young people’s mental health, and ESA Academy, an academy that trains 14-19 year-olds in the screen media, decided to form a partnership. Through this programme, we’ll be expanding on our first collaboration – transforming Lab research into short films – to capture the ‘behind-the-scenes’ impact of this partnership, as well as creating opportunities for young people and clinicians to learn from each other about why young people’s mental health matters. 

Poushali Ganguli & Emma Tassie, Research Associates, Health Services & Population Research
with
Young Vic & Ned Glasier
In Isolation

In Isolation is a participatory arts project exploring the impact of isolation booths in schools. Internal exclusion has become widespread in English schools – nearly 90% of secondary schools use isolation as a behaviour management tool, yet the practice remains unregulated and officially untracked. Working with theatre-maker Ned Glasier and Young Vic, we will engage young people as commissioners who reappropriate and redesign isolation booths as expressions of hope, creativity and identity. Professional artists will collaborate with participants to realise their ideas, first as scale models, with ambitions for full-size public installations. We aim to develop a deeper understanding of how isolation feels and functions from young people's perspectives, pilot participatory methodologies combining research with artistic practice, create up to four prototype booth models, and establish foundations for a larger-scale project.

Social Science & Public Policy

George Adamson, Reader in Climate and Society, Department of Geography 
with
Historic England
Exploring and conserving English weather-heritage

This project builds on the concept of ‘weather-heritage’. This concept argues that weather is so central to sense of place and cultural ways of living that the ways that people represent weather through culture – and weather itself – should be considered forms of intangible cultural heritage.

This project seeks to understand how people in England build a sense of place-identity through weather, to explore how weather-heritage can contribute to engagement with climate change, and to gather and test insights from across the cultural and heritage sector about the potential of curatorial and artistic practices in preserving weather-heritage that will be lost. 
Through development of a network of academics and heritage practitioners working on weather and culture, the team will focus on writing a major funding application to enable to work to continue beyond the seed fund.

Nathaniel Telemaque, Lecturer in Geography and Social Justice, Department of Geography
with
Metroland Cultures
Stonebridge 19XX: Oral and Visual Histories

‘Tales of Stonebridge’ is a geographic practice-based research project focused on demystifying and critically opposing the stigmatised representations and memories of the Stonebridge neighbourhood in North London. This locale was previously a 1960s constructed postwar tower-block estate that was regenerated during the early 2000s. Collaborating with a Stonebridge Community Champion and Metroland Cultures Studios, the project team will carry out oral history interviews with African-Caribbean residents of Stonebridge, conduct a series of community engagements to scan and collect family album photographs and residents' depictions of Stonebridge before the year 2000, and undertake archival research that engages with past representations of the Stonebridge Estate. The collaboration with Metroland Cultures will lead to a community engagement workshop event.