David Burns

Dr David Burns is a Senior Tutor (Research) and Lead, Media Studies, a unit he initiated in 2016. He has two decades of international experience in tertiary education in colleges of architecture, art, and design. From 2009-2016, he was the founding director of Photography and Situated Media at the University of Technology Sydney. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, and a BArch from the University of Tennessee. David is a co-founder of the Fiction Feeling Frame research collective.

David's RCA profile
burns.art


Tutors, 2022-23

Sarah Akigbogun

Sarah Akigbogun is a transdisciplinary practitioner; an architect, filmmaker, writer and educator. She is also trained as an actor. She uses narrative disciplines, film and theatre, to explore the human condition in architecture and cities and has performed with several women-led theatre companies, exploring these themes. Sarah is interested in the meeting of matter and mind; how the latter affects the former and how these are affected by context. She uses the tools of a storyteller as a tool of exploration.


Riccardo Badano

Riccardo Badano is a researcher and editor whose work investigates the entanglement between the environment and politics. He graduated with an MA from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2018. As Embedded Researcher at Het Nieuwe Instituut, he has collaborated with Studio Formafantasma and Serpentine Galleries on the exhibition Cambio for which he edited, together with Rebecca Lewin, the exhibition catalogue (Walther König Books, 2020). He is currently working on a series of books on radical pedagogies in Critical Spatial Practices (Spector Books, forthcoming) and on Something of the Sun (with Hanna Rullmann), a visual investigation of European acclimatized landscapes. In addition, Riccardo is a PhD student in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.


Mark Campbell

Mark Campbell is a writer and historian whose research and practice engages with photography, film, literature, and other media histories. In particular, his work focuses on the evidencing of architectures and landscapes in economic decline. He received his PhD from Princeton University as a Fulbright Graduate Scholar, Princeton Honorific Scholar, and Paul Mellon Scholarship recipient. He is a former editor of Grey Room (MIT Press) and The Journal of Architecture (RIBA & Routledge) and is a College Member of the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. He is the author of Paradise Lost (AA Publications, 2016) and the forthcoming Bernard Berenson and the Art Market (Lund Humphries, 2024); The Parallax View (BFI Film Classics, 2024); Architecture as a Frail, Literary Object (Routledge, 2025); and Post-Architectures of the United States (Routledge, 2026).


Jermaine Francis

Jermaine Francis (he/him) is a London based photographer/artist whose practice can be found within publishing, the gallery, and editorial, and works primarily in the discourse of the photo document. His work explores our physical and psychological negotiation of space in the everyday, acting as a stimulus for an investigation of gender, race, and class. Jermaine has recently published Rhythms from the Metroplex, an investigation of non-linear narratives and movement in the city. His most recent project ‘A Storied Ground’ an analysis of the Black figure and the complicated relationship with the English Landscape will be exhibited at Galeriepcp in September 2022.


Gabriella Hirst

Gabriella Hirst (she/her) is an artist. She was born and grew up on Cammeraygal land (Australia) and is currently living between Berlin and London. She works primarily with moving image, performance, and with the garden as a site of critique and care. Gabriella holds an MFA in Fine Art Media from Slade school in London, and a degree from COFA and the IUAV in Venice. She is the recipient of the 2020 ACMI/Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, is a previous Marten Bequest Scholar and a recipient of the John Crampton Fellowship.

gabriellahirst.com


Mustapha Jundi

Mustapha Jundi is an architect, artist, and PhD candidate (Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London). His work encompasses the fields of design, visual culture and geography and his doctoral research investigates borders and the subterranean in the context of Lebanon. He holds an MArch from Yale University and was a fellow at Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace Program (2015-16). He was a part-time senior lecturer at the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut (2012-2018). Before co-founding apractice studio in Beirut (2009-2015), he was a designer at Weiss/Manfredi Architects and Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York City (2002-2009).

mustaphajundi.com


Keren Kuenberg

Keren Kuenberg is an architectural researcher and a curator. Her practice is situated at the intersection of the built environment, archives, exhibitions, and politics with an ongoing interest in shaping the outcome with various interactive formats. She’s worked for museums such as the CCA (Montreal), HKW (Berlin) and the Israel Museum (Jerusalem) as well as non-profit organizations and universities. She is interested in expanding how architecture knowledge is created, documented, understood, and presented to a wider public and exploring how politics and foreign affairs play a role in this.

kerenkberg.com


Sonia Levy

Sonia Levy's research-based practice uses filmmaking as a device for site-based inquiries and interdisciplinary collaborations, fostering multiple perspectives to consider new worlds. Her work queries western expansionist and extractivist logics while tending to critical forms of engagement with more-than-human worlds. She is the 2022 recipient of the S+T+ARTS4Water's 'The Future of High Waters' residency hosted by TBA21 in Venice, and she was the 2021 commissioned artist at Radar Loughborough and Aarhus University's Ecological Globalization Research Group.


Thandi Loewenson

Thandi Loewenson (b.1989, Harare) is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations. Thandi is a Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art, co-founder of the architectural collectives BREAK//LINE and Fiction, Feeling, Frame, and a co-curator of Race, Space & Architecture.

thandiloewenson.com/


Sam Nightingale

Sam Nightingale is an artist-researcher working within environmental media. He works with creative methodologies to re-imagine and re-image the spectral-material complexities of settler colonialism, extractivism and their ongoing environmental, ethical, and political impact on human and non-human worlds. His practice uses experimental forms of photography and speculative fieldwork to explore the geopolitical interface between history, ecology and the image. Recent activities include Traversing Topologies (SARN), Spot on Economies (PACT Zollverein), Instituting (HKW Berlin). He is co-editor of the book Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Onomatopee, forthcoming), and a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London (Media, Communication & Cultural Studies & The Centre for Research Architecture).

samnightingale.com


Mirna Pedalo

Mirna Pedalo is a London-based architectural practitioner, researcher and scholar interested in the intersection of architecture, urban development and finance. Her work focuses on the impact of convergence of human and capital flows, particularly in post-conflict societies in the Western Balkans. Originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mirna has practiced architecture in the Netherlands, Republic of Ireland and the UK. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a recipient of the RIBA President’s Award for Research 2019 in the Cities and Community category.


Hanna Rullmann

Hanna Rullmann is a researcher, filmmaker and designer, whose practice engages questions of ecological restoration, environmental histories, environmental policy and legal/political production of natures. She graduated with an MA from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths in 2018. She has worked as a researcher for Airwars and Amnesty and is a founding member of the Border Ecologies network, a research group that investigates the complex ecological relations of border landscapes. Exhibitions/screenings/lectures include MIMA (UK), ar/ge kunst (IT), Vdrome, Tranzit (SK), Z33 (BE), Jan van Eyck (NL), La Casa Encendida (ES) and Het Nieuwe Instituut (NL).

hanna-rullmann.com


Mhamad Safa

Mhamad Safa is a sound artist, architect, and researcher, based between London and Beirut. His work focuses on multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. He explores their intersections with aural legacies of traditional and subcultural practices as well as environments of conflict and violence. He was a fellow at Ashkal Alwan HWP in 2018. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture and is currently a Phd candidate in International Law at the University of Westminster. Safa has shown individual and collaborative artwork and performances at Goethe Institute in Beirut, Arab Center for Architecture, the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, the Centre for Research Architecture in London, and the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, among others.

mhamadsafa.com


Linn Phyllis Seeger

Operating at the interface between photography, moving image, and 3d modelling, Linn Phyllis Seeger’s work is rooted in digital imaging and online media, examining the ways in which we navigate the private and public spheres of our password-protected personalised interfaces, social networks, and urban spaces. Of specific interest within her iPhone-based artistic practice and research are contemporary modes of intimacy enabled through digital communication. Linn Phyllis Seeger’s first monograph 'You I Everything Else', articulating post-digital romance as an ecstasy of communication, was published by Skinnerboox in November 2020.

linn-phyllis-seeger.com


Kelly Spanou

Kelly Spanou is an architectural researcher with an interest in the build environment, technology, and the body from a critical decolonial perspective. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the School of Communication (RCA), wherein she explores these themes in the context of museums, focusing on epistemological questions around the role that art exhibitions may play as sites of knowledge production. Kelly has a degree in Architecture (NTUA, Greece) and Information Experience Design (RCA). She has experience as a CGI artist and architectural visualiser. Her work has been exhibited in events such as RA Lates, London Design Festival, Jena FullDome International Festival, Sonar+D Festival.


Rosa Whiteley

Rosa Whiteley is a spatial practitioner and researcher based in London. Her work investigates how we have organised the world through toxic flows, and how those flows, in turn, organise us. Operating between archival film collage, animation, and physical installations, her work documents and assembles stories of more-than-human acts of resilience within contemporary material flows. Her work has been presented in Beijing, Essen, Brussels and London. In December 2021, Operaciones Editorial published Rosa’s first book, Horizontas Rosados. Rosa also works as a project manager for Cooking Sections, who use food as a lens and tool to observe landscapes in transformation.


Media Studies Tutor History

Sarah Akigbogun (2022, 23)

Riccardo Badano (2022, 23)

Alison Bartlett (2023)

Ayanna Blair-Ford (2023)

Ariel Caine (2019, 20, 23)

Ibiye Camp (2020)

Mark Campbell (2022)

Kamil Dalkir (2016, 17, 18, 19, 20)

Matthew Darmour-Paul (2020)

Gabriella Demczuk (2023)

Ifor Duncan (2019, 21)

Jermaine Francis (2022, 23)

Gabriella Hirst (2020, 21, 22)

Daryan Knoblauch (2023)

Mustapha Jundi (20, 21, 22)

Helene Kazan (2018, 19)

Keren Kuenberg (20, 21, 22)

Kenzie Larsen (2018)

Joshua Leon (2023)

Sonia Levy (2022, 23)

Thandi Loewenson (2022)

Lilly Markaki (2023)

Matteo Mastrandrea (2016)

Marie Munk (2018)

Sam Nightingale (2021, 22, 23)

Bahar Noorizadeh (2019, 20, 21)

Mirna Pedalo (2019, 20, 21, 22, 23)

Hanna Rullman (2021, 22)

Mhamad Safa (2021, 22, 23)

Linn Phyllis Seeger (2021, 22, 23)

Kelly Spanou (2017, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23)

Freya Spencer-Wood (2023)

Lennaart van Oldenborgh (2023)

Rosa Whiteley (2022, 23)

Tania Lopez Winkler (2019)