GLOBAL LOW-RESIDENCY PRACTICE PHD

Our unique three-year Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) full-time low-residency program requires an average work commitment of 30 hours per week. Intensive dates and lengths will vary between 2 and 14 days. You will study wherever you live and work conducting independent research with the support of individual advisory teams and peer critique. Our program is built around your practice and intensive residencies, which offer opportunities to meet other established international artists, curators, and writers; participate in presentations, symposia, fora, research seminars and topical workshops, screenings, cultural excursions, talks, peer presentations; and other events. The Creative Research PhD is for everyone with a specific project or question/s whose practice embodies or nearly drives their research.

Transart provides a unique entwinement of live and trans-local intensives and interim mutual support in any form you and your advisors agree upon. There are no requirements for how these communications take place in terms of presence, media, time, and space, just guidelines. As a global community, discussions, advisements, critiques, and meetings often occur by Zoom, Facetime, and Skype, but can also occur in person, by letter, text, phone, or in a mix of myriad forms. Interim exchanges are determined by your locations, schedules, and ultimately, what serves your project best.

Our institute does not offer pre-packaged online learning. We offer unique, one-time workshops in person and trans-locally so that you can contribute and respond to exercises, assignments, and projects in whatever media and genres you wish to work in. No one has the option to participate in live intensives virtually. The intimate quality of time spent at intensives is not comparable to virtual encounters. Bonds are formed in person, in workshops and cafes, in collaborations and in mutually shared experiences. We are away from our jobs, families, and everything familiar, navigating the unknown and the unexpected and giving a precious opportunity to focus solely on our praxis, gain a new perspective and fresh inputs, and insights in our process. Off-site, we sustain relations and practices in complementary and supportive ways.

Led by your question/s —the scope of which will hold your attention for three years— your thesis will be an entwining of praxis, reflection, and research in which writing is an integral contributor to your creative inquiry.

Your creative research-based project will culminate in a thesis —of no more than 40,000 words— a public presentation or Viva Voce, and an exhibition, publication, reading, model, performance, screening, or other forms of dissemination suitable for presenting your new work at your final intensive.

A Creative Research PhD is for everyone who desires to: bring their praxis to a significantly new level in terms of creation and articulation; to contribute beyond their particular field to a broader artistic/academic context; to teach at all levels, transdisciplinary or in more than one field; to continue to exhibit, publish, curate, and perform in and beyond our international community. We believe that creative practitioners deserve to receive the same level of recognition, respect, and resources as those at the highest levels in other fields.

You will study wherever you live and work, conducting independent research with the support of individual advisory teams and peer critique. Our program is built around your practice and intensive residencies, which offer opportunities to meet other established international artists, curators, and writers; participate in presentations, symposia, fora, research seminars and topical workshops, screenings, cultural excursions, talks, peer presentations; and other events.

Students typically work with one faculty member from LJMU and one or two Transart advisors for the duration of their projects.

Transart Institute is a space for experimentation and thinking in any form, sharing and connecting, and offering practice-based doctoral studies in a low-residency model. We champion self-directed, curious, flexible, and socially engaged creative researchers working independently and/or collectively.

Our border-free platform attracts an eclectic international body of students and advisors from equally diverse artistic and academic contexts and geographic locations as part of a global, trans-disciplinary research community, creating opportunities to expand, enhance and sustain individual and collective practices in the world, beyond the walls of the academy.

We support research on themes in all creative genres, including art and social technologies; curatorial practices; cultural engagement through food; docufiction and creative writing; ecology and environmental activism; expanded studio practices; experimental pedagogies; fashion and textiles; foreignness, otherness; home, nostalgia and the uncanny; international diaspora and exiled states; language and image; liminal states, interstices, and spacetime; media and design; memory, forgetting, trauma and the archive; movement, dance, choreography; new materialism, object-oriented ontology; olfactory arts; peace, mediation, and performative activism; post-nationalism, post-colonialism; publishing as an art practice; robotics; sound, music, field recordings, composing; space and temporary architecture; walking as an art practice.