Amy Cutler

Amy is an artist, cultural geographer, curator, writer, and film-maker who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others. In her career in the GeoHumanities she has completed a PhD, a post-doc, and an ECR fellowship, and during this time she has exhibited her work or run live events with organisations including the BBC, Somerset House, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sheffield Institute of Arts, the Wellcome Trust, the Horniman Museum, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Late Junction, Tate Modern, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, the Horse Hospital, the Natural History Museum, and Kew Museum of Economic Botany. Her geography training impacts her work as an artist, performer, and curator, and she works frequently on the production of immersive and live cinema and exhibition events provoking and changing the public conversation around ideas of space, geography, and nature-cultures. She currently lectures in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Other

Amy runs the Live Cinema UK commissioned internationally touring show NATURE’S NICKELODEONS, which investigates the production of concepts of nature through social screening practices, from the proto-cinematic (live specimen projection) to contemporary nature doc re-scoring. This has been profiled by medium.com for “leading the field” in the international renaissance of live cinema as a progressive, investigative art form. She is an executive committee member for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, ran the White Rose project Hearts of Oak: Caring for British Woodlands, founded the cultural geography cinema PASSENGERFILMS, and has twice won the top annual award from the national organisation Cinema For All for innovative educational cinema programming.

Leverhulme Research

Amy has recently completed a fellowship considering the ethical, political, philosophical, and ecological implications of the question 'what is a forest?'. Ranging from the analysis of 17th century dictionaries to contemporary science fiction cinema, this research follows the long line of "semantic horror" in the woods, beginning with Dante: 'Ah me, how hard a thing it was to say / What was this forest savage'. This is not just about the conflicts and contradictions in the ways in which we have defined the forest, but also the ways in which it might be redefined, whether in speculative fiction or in contemporary cultural ecologies. See Leverhulme profile page here.