Dr Mahsa Foroughi
- Kingston School of Art
- Department of Film and Photography
- School of Arts
- Design, Arts and Creative Practice
Lecturer in Filmmaking
About
I came to cinema by way of architecture, though writing was there before either. Growing up in Iran, I wrote poetry and short stories long before I trained and practised as an architect. Over time, I noticed that architecture, philosophy and cinema kept circling the same ground. How do we experience time? How does a space hold memory? What can an image say that language cannot quite manage? Those questions took me to Australia, where I completed a PhD at Griffith University across architecture, film and philosophy, and then taught at UNSW in Sydney, tracing the connections between architecture, cinema, politics and the city. In 2022, I became a student again, taking an MFA in Writing for Performance at NIDA. I wanted to carry years of theory into the less predictable work of dramatic writing and collaboration with other artists. Since then, my research and creative practice have grown side by side. I work across film-philosophy, poetry, screenwriting and experimental moving image, and I keep returning to temporality, embodied perception and memory. My video work Poetic Revolution has been shown in Berlin, Weimar and Dresden. I am completing Embodied Temporality in Film and Architecture, co-authored with Professor Thorsten Botz-Bornstein for Palgrave Macmillan, and a poetry collection, Journal of the Dead, for Asemana Books. I am also developing, as Principal Investigator, Between Elsewheres: An Authors’ Room for Cinema, an international initiative on migration, memory, political rupture and collective authorship.
Before joining Kingston University, I was Course Leader of the postgraduate department at MetFilm School Berlin, overseeing Master’s programmes in production, directing, producing, documentary and cinematography. Alongside teaching, I served on the Academic Board and led work on curriculum, quality assurance and assessment, including training colleagues in assessment literacy. Much of my energy went into a curriculum that brought film history and philosophy into conversation with how films are made today and what emerging filmmakers need to build a working life. I have never believed that filmmaking can be cut loose from its history or its ideas. A cut, a camera movement, the decision to stay on an image a beat longer: each is a way of thinking, whether we recognise it or not. I care just as much about how films get made and whose voices shape them. What I write, what I make and how I collaborate are all part of an effort to loosen the film industry’s inherited hierarchies and move towards forms of authorship grounded in shared enquiry and shared imagination.
Qualifications
- BSc, Architectural Engineering
- MSc, Architectural Engineering
- PhD, Architecture, Film and Philosophy
- MFA, Writing for Performance