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Network linking creatives and academics launched across UK

Seed funding has been allocated to ten partnerships as part of a two-year pilot project nurturing collaboration between academics and creative small businesses.

Christy Romer
2 min read

The first ten collaborations between academics and creative small businesses have been awarded £5k in seed funding through the National Academics and Creatives Exchange.

The two-year, national pilot programme run by The Culture Capital Exchange (TCCE), which has worked in London for the past ten years, sees each creative organisation partner with an academic from one of 16 regional higher education institutions.

The ten projects to receive funding include:

  • National Portfolio Organisation Furtherfield and Manchester Metropolitan University examining the work of artists who engage with blockchain technologies, such as bitcoin;
  • Pavilion and the University of Leeds creating a new film focused on the experiences of women refugees;
  • Mind the Gap and the Centre for Aesthetics working to evaluate the quality of learning disability performance;
  • IJAD Dance Company and Liverpool John Moore’s University exploring how to build choreographic architecture that translates across digital media and responds to audience input;
  • Estuary English’s ‘The Lost Hope Book Club’, which will see it work with Canterbury Christ Church University to republish out-of-copyright books with ideas that were either wrong or displaced by a better theory.

The network is funded by Arts Council England (ACE) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, and is based on a model of networking opportunities, development workshops and guidance used by The Culture Capital Exchange in London since 2005.

Joyce Wilson, Arts Council England’s London Area Director, said: “[TCCE] is now in a strong position to roll out its programme across the country and to build a more coherent and sustainable relationship between arts practice and academic research nationally.”

Director of The Culture Capital Exchange Suzie Leighton said: “With The Exchange we are developing a national network of higher education institutions to share best practice, lessons learned from individual initiatives and avoid duplication in this developing area.

“The Exchange is also providing a valuable peer-to-peer network and skills development opportunities for early career researchers and creatives wanting to collaborate with academics.”

The Exchange plans to award 20 more grants of £5k to collaborative research projects. The deadline for applications to the second round of awards is 6 June 2016.