Dr Clare Watson

Director, Media Archive for Central England

Closing Plenary Invited Speaker


Clare is the Director of the Media Archive for Central England (MACE), and oversees the staff team and all operations at MACE.  She also provides strategic leadership and manages stakeholder relationships as well as being responsible for fundraising and project delivery. She taught film archiving at post-graduate level and has delivered training programmes to new entrants and professionals. Most recently, she managed the London’s Screen Archives.


Kathy Fawcett

Senior Relationship Manager, Arts Council England

Closing Plenary Invited Speaker


Kathy Fawcett is a Senior Relationship Manager for Arts Council England, based in the Nottingham office. Kathy is the Arts Council England Midlands Area lead for museums and visual arts and the co-lead for strategic partnerships. Kathy has worked for the Arts Council for 7 years in both the Midlands and the South East Areas. Before joining the Arts Council, Kathy worked within local government, including managing The City Gallery, Leicester and also within the artist-led sector in Nottingham.


Sukhy Johal MBE

Director, Centre for Culture & Creativity, University of Lincoln

"Joining the Dots: Partnerships, Participation and Platforms"


Sukhy Johal is the Founding Director of the University of Lincoln’s Centre for Culture & Creativity and Chair of the Heritage Dot Management Committee. He has over 20 years of senior experience covering the full breadth of the cultural sector and working with local communities, and a demonstrable track record of managing and innovating partnerships. His professional background includes roles in local, regional and national government and the commercial sector. Sukhy champions the social and catalytic power of culture, with a particular focus on cultural diversity and social enterprise. Sukhy started his career as a volunteer with Apna Arts, later steering the organisation’s transformation into New Art Exchange, one of the first BAME-led art galleries outside of London, and is a trustee for the organisation today. He worked on major events in Nottingham, including the 1996 European Football Championships, before moving to Leicester to support the development of one of the UK’s most successful cultural-led regeneration programmes. He shaped one of the first city based Cultural Strategies, the establishment of the Cultural Quarter in Leicester, and brought investment into the city. As CEO, Sukhy then went on to lead Culture East Midlands, the region’s Cultural Consortium, on behalf of Government, driving the development of the sector, establishing large-scale transformative projects like the Cultural Olympiad and drafting Regional Policy. Sukhy has worked as a management consultant across culture, economic regeneration and place-making projects. Sukhy is a National Council Member and Midlands Area Chair for Arts Council England.


Prof Chris Speed

Chair of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh

"Designing Value within a Digital Heritage Economy"


Prof. Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where his research focuses upon the Network Society, Design for the Digital Economy, and The Internet of Things. Chris collaborates with a wide variety of partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt, and create products and services within a networked society. He especially favours transgressive design interventions, to help identify and promote the values we care about most, including coffee machines that order their own ethical supplies, hairdryers that ask you to wait for the right time to blow dry your hair, and apps for sham marriages. Chris is co-editor of the journal Ubiquity and co-directs the Design Informatics Research Centre that is home to a combination of researchers working across the fields of interaction design, temporal design, anthropology, software engineering and digital architecture, as well as the PhD, MA/MFA and MSc and Advanced MSc programmes. Chris has an established track record in directing large complex grants with industry partners, being involved in 25 research grants (leading on 10) since 2009 across ESPRC, ESRC and AHRC. He was PI to the EPSRC funded Tales of Things project that collaborated with museums, galleries and the international charity Oxfam to add stories to second hand artefacts. Chris also led the Walking Through Time project that replaced contemporary Google maps for historical maps of Edinburgh, allowing them to walk over forgotten railway tracks and swim in long lost Lochs. Recently awarded £6m (£5.5m AHRC & £0.5m SFC) to lead the Creative Informatics R&D Partnership, one of the nine AHRC funded Creative Industries Clusters, Chris is working with tech start-ups to explore data driven innovation for museums, galleries and libraries.


Matt Lee

Head of Film, Imperial War Museums

"Going Over the Top: What does the super-enhancement of First World War footage mean for film archives?"


Matt Lee is the Head of Film at Imperial War Museums. After studying English and later Film History at university, the glamorous world of film archiving lured Matt away from the Czech Republic where he had been masquerading as an English teacher. He has been a film curator for 18 years at IWM and was also the IWM Short Film Festival Director from 2013 to 2017. When not delving into the murky waters of his Devonshire lineage, he takes an interest in the question of fakery and reconstruction in non-fiction film and is also drawn to avant-garde and experimental propaganda film.


Prof Melissa Terras

Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage, University of Edinburgh

"Cultural Heritage in a Digitised World: the responsibility of memory institutions within the digital turn"


Melissa Terras is the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, leading digital aspects of research and building digital capacity in the new Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts, humanities, and wider cultural heritage and information environment that would otherwise be impossible. With a background in Classical Art History, English Literature and Computing Science, her doctorate examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read Roman texts. She is a Turing Institute Fellow 2018-2020 and an Honorary Professor at UCL. Her work includes Image to Interpretation (2006, OUP), Digital Images for the Information Professional (2008, Ashgate), the representation of academics in children’s literature  with Picture Book Professors (2018, CUP), The Professor in Children’s Literature (2018, Fincham Press), and she has co-edited Digital Humanities in Practice (2012, Facet) and Defining Digital Humanities (2013, Ashgate). Melissa is general editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and serves on the Board of Curators of the University of Oxford Libraries, the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, and several advisory boards. She is a Fellow of CILIP and the British Computer Society, and a Chartered IT Professional. Melissa was the Co-Investigator of the the EPSRC funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA), program chair of the major international conference Digital Humanities 2014, vice-chair of DH2013 and outgoing chair of DH2015. Melissa is on twitter – @melissaterras.


Prof Mary Stuart CBE

Vice Chancellor, University of Lincoln

"Preparing for the 21st Century"


Mary is Vice Chancellor of the University of Lincoln. She is a graduate of the University of Cape Town and the Open University where she obtained her Doctorate in Social Policy in 1998. Her research interests are focussed on life histories, social mobility, higher education students and community development. Mary has a strong track record in all aspects of University management, having worked in senior roles in three different universities. Since joining Lincoln she has established and grown the first new Engineering School to be created in the UK for more than 20 years (in collaboration with Siemens plc) and successfully led the development of Science provision at Lincoln (including the Schools of Chemistry, Pharmacy and Physics and Mathematics). Passionate about the student experience, Mary seeks to continually drive change and improvements in the partnership with students and the academic community, working closely with the Students’ Union at Lincoln. Mary is a board member of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Chair of HEFCE’s Teaching Excellence and Student Opportunity Committee, member of Universities UK’s task force on Social Mobility, and Vice Chair of the Equality Challenge Unit. Mary is also the Founding Director of the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership (GLLEP) and a member of the Greater Lincolnshire Leaders Board. She is also a Director on the Brayford Trust, Lincolnshire Economic Action Partnership, Lincoln Science & Innovation Park, a Trustee of Lincolnshire Bomber Command, Chair of Lincoln Arts & Cultural Partnership and Chair of Members of the Lincolnshire Educational Trust.


Tom Steinberg

Digital Lead, The National Lottery Heritage Fund

"Taking off the training wheels: the skills funders and heritage organisations need to have in a pervasively digital age"


The National Lottery Heritage Fund are the largest dedicated funder of heritage in the UK. Since 1994, the National Lottery Heritage Fund have awarded £7.9 billion to over 43,000 projects, and are a leading advocate for the value of heritage. The National Lottery Heritage Fund use money raised by National Lottery players to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about. The National Lottery Heritage Fund are a host partner and headline contributor to the Heritage Dot conference programme. The Heritage Dot team welcomed Eilish McGuinness, Director of Operations at The National Lottery Heritage Fund, to September 2018’s launch event, and are looking forward to welcoming Tom Steinberg as the Heritage Fund’s Digital Lead to June’s conference. The National Lottery Heritage Fund have also sponsored the Heritage Dot Bursary Scheme. Tom Steinberg is interested in how digital technologies are used to advance the public interest, and is a former CEO who specialises in helping current leaders to develop clear strategies. He is a founder of mySociety, a citizen-empowerment NGO and writes on a range of issues relating to power, technology and government. Now working with The National Lottery, he has worked as the Digital Transformation Lead at the Big Lottery Fund.


Diane Lees CBE

Director-General of Imperial War Museums

"Mythbusting : Digital isn't about technology, it's about people"


Diane Lees is the Director-General of Imperial War Museums, the cultural lead for the Centenary of the First World War, and is a Trustee of 14-18NOW, the Centenary’s Cultural Programme. Diane is a Trustee of the IWM Development Trust, The Gerry Holdsworth Special Forces Trust, and the Army Museums Ogilby Trust. She serves as Vice President of the American Air Museum in Britain and is a member of the Women Leaders in Museums Network (WLMN). Diane also sits on the judging panels of the Museums + Heritage Awards and she is a member of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s Experts’ Reference Group. In 2016, Diane chaired a review of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)’s Museums, Galleries and Collections Fund. From April 2013 to March 2017, Diane chaired the National Museum Directors’ Council (NMDC). In April 2014, she was appointed to the University of Lincoln’s Board of Governors and in January 2015, to the University of Oxford Humanities External Advisory Board. In December 2014, Diane was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list for services to museums, and in July 2015, was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree by the University of Reading. In June 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Arts by Nottingham Trent University.

22nd March 2023

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