Ms Rachel Davies

I am an international award-winning filmmaker with 30 years of practice research experience, specialising in interdisciplinary creative collaboration and embodied film practice.

My work spans creative documentary, immersive interactive environments, artist's film, numerous touring theatre / dance collaborations for stage and screen, projection-mapping and TV promo. I have been commissioned by Channel 4, BBC Open University, Arts Council England, Manchester International Festival, Wellcome Trust, Sadlers' Wells, Siobhan Davies Studios, The Place, British Council, Dulwich Picture Gallery, and National Gallery.

My work is in international collections and has been screened and broadcast in festivals and on TV around the world, and has been recognised for Research Excellence (contributing to REF 2008, 2014 and 2021).

Learning and insights from this work is captured to enhance knowledge and inform future research.

With a background in Fine Art (Nottingham Trent University), MTV Asia, and the Royal College of Art (Animation), I was the inaugural filmmaker Associate Artist at The Place, London, during which time I collaborated with numerous choreographers for film and stage, for example on a short film We Got Old shot on 16mm in Hong Kong. I received a major art prize the IMZ Dance Screen Award for my short film Gold about teenage gymnasts in a South London suburb. As John Thaw Fellow in Drama at Manchester University I was commissioned by the inaugural Manchester International Festival for The Assembly a single-screen film installation at Cornerhouse Gallery, about my memory of singing in the Manchester Girls' Choir.

In my creative practice and research, often derived from lived experience, I employ both seductive and distancing devices and a collision of media to both engage and gently challenge audiences within personal and human stories. I hone the communicative potentials of filmic hybridity within screen and/or live settings, embracing new languages and technologies. Dissemination of knowledge and learning is within an intentionally broad context; from art gallery, cinema and theatre, to hospitals and primetime television broadcast; their impact is to raise awareness of societal issues and to challenge discourses of exclusion and stigma though unexpected beauty.

In 2016 I formed R&D Studio www.rachelanddaniel.co, a production company with artist Daniel Saul, to create projects that are human-centred, collaborative, creatively and technically innovative; engaging a wide audience in response to a range of social, cultural and aesthetic situations. This non-hierarchical project has so far achieved remarkable outcomes, for example:

Winter – a creative documentary portrait of Mandy who has a terminal illness, made for a huge monumental screen for Manchester Aviva Studios (part of an epic 7-hour durational piece of theatre about time and the human life cycle, with Quarantine Theatre) 

Ek Choti si Asha: A Small Dream – a Channel 4 / British Council short film starting an ongoing collaboration with a dancer in Bangalore referencing India's involvement in the current space race, culminating in theatre-based productions, site-specific live art, projection-mapping and performance projection spectaculars in the UK and India.

Moving Out – a public art moving digital collage screen for Tessa Jowell Health Centre South London, made with users of the health centre and Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Extremity of the West – a digital collage film for the huge LED screen in the new National Gallery Sainsbury wing atrium.

Areas of specialism

• Human-centred moving image for wellbeing
• Interdisciplinary creative practice
• Embodied documentary practice
• Collaborative performance film
• Dance film
• Animation
• Site-specific screen-based art
• Experimental film
• Projection-mapping
• Projection in stage performance
• Women filmmakers
• Community film
• Creativity in community engagement

• MA (RCA) Animation
• BA (Hons) Fine Art