My Expertise
Experiential media design, Visual culture, Trauma, Immersive media/VR, psychosocial and creative approaches to mental health and trauma
Biography
Jill Bennett is Scientia Professor and Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. She is Founding Director of the Big Anxiety Research Centre [BARC] ; and is part of the leadership team of the Ageing Futures Institute.
In 2017, she founded The Big Anxiety – festival of people + art + science, a research-driven, mental health festival, which won ‘Best New Event’ at the Australian Event Awards in its inaugural year, 2017
Jill Bennett is Scientia Professor and Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. She is Founding Director of the Big Anxiety Research Centre [BARC] ; and is part of the leadership team of the Ageing Futures Institute.
In 2017, she founded The Big Anxiety – festival of people + art + science, a research-driven, mental health festival, which won ‘Best New Event’ at the Australian Event Awards in its inaugural year, 2017 https://www.thebiganxiety.org/.
Jill’s ARC Laureate fellowship (which commenced in 2018) supports the transdisciplinary Felt Experience & Empathy Lab [fEEL] at UNSW. fEEL brings together psychosocial and creative practitioners, specialising in mental health engagement, and in the use of experiential media such as virtual reality to communicate embodied experience. fEEL’s innovative approach to subjective experience and knowledge exchange utilises immersive media/Virtual Reality to create perception simulation, facilitating ‘seeing through the eyes of another’. Outputs include the IEEE Award winning The Visit, an interactive avatar made with women with dementia.
https://vimeo.com/showcase/6799615. Collaborations include work with NPY Women’s Council/Uti Kulintjaku https://www.thebiganxiety.org/events/uti-kulintjaku-initiative/.
Jill’s books include Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, Stanford UP, 2005 and Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affect & Art After 9/11, 2011 -- and more recently, The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Recent articles describing the strategies of The Big Anxiety within a psychosocial framework include Bennett, J., Froggett, L. and Muller, L. (2019) Psychosocial aesthetics and the art of lived experience, Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 12(1-2): 185–2010.
Bennett, J. (2022). Visual communication and mental health. Visual Communication, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572221130451
Videos - see
w: Big Anxiety Research Centre
w: fEEL Lab
Contact
Publications
ORCID as entered in ROS
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2164-0245
Research Activities
This project evaluates the means and benefits of leveraging the arts to address the challenge of eco-sustainability. Ecological art practice is emerging globally but how and under what conditions does it positively transform environments, behaviour or patterns of consumption? A partnership between arts researchers and the City of Sydney, Curating Cities assesses major international public art projects and their strategies for change, and establishes robust data on the characteristics of this emerging field. It evolves a curatorial plan, providing a cultural strategy to meet the City of…