Jessica Boyall

Jess is a PhD candidate and Visiting Tutor in the department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Fully funded by the AHRC (TECHNE), her doctoral research focuses on the representation and positioning of women in Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, Sankofa Film and Video Collective and the Black Audio Film Collective. In 2022, she received a Paul Mellon Research Grant towards her doctoral research. More broadly, Jess is interested in film and art history, digital culture, feminism and collective practice.

Jess’s writing has been published in numerous journals including the New Left Review, Third Text and the Public Domain Review alongside publications such as Mubi’s Notebook, Art UK and The Guardian. She has held various professional research positions including, most recently, an academic fellowship at StoryFutures Academy, where she worked on the immersive VR documentary, Off the Record (NoGhost), which, funded by AHRC, toured the UK, and was exhibited at BFI in London in 2022. Prior to beginning her PhD, Jess was a Research Assistant at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she worked on a digital research project dedicated to deciphering and encoding the manuscripts, proofs and working notes of Charles Dickens, and at London’s Design Museum, where she researched and edited the exhibition catalogue ‘Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–18’.  Alongside her PhD she works as the Cultural Projects Manager of the Art's Council funded project space, Ormside Projects, where she manages major funding bids .

Jess holds a History of Design MA (with distinction) from the Royal College of Art and a First-Class Undergraduate Master’s degree in Classical Studies from the University of Edinburgh.