Dr Jacqueline Donachie is Baxter Fellow in Creative Economies in Art and Design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.

Her AHRC funded doctoral study Illuminating Loss, The Capacity for Artworks to Shape Research and Care in the Field of Genetics (Northumbria, 2016) was interdisciplinary, practice led and involved a high level of filmed participant interview with a range of individuals recruited via an external, non-academic institution. The work continued a long collaborative engagement with biomedical researchers in Newcastle and Glasgow and the resultant moving image work Hazel won AHRC Best Doctoral Film prize in 2015. Her research interests cover contemporary art practice, in particular socially engaged interdisciplinary work, healthcare, leadership and inclusion, with an emphasis on the role of participation in academic and artistic research.

Following graduation from Glasgow School of Art Donachie won a Fulbright Award for MFA at Hunter College in New York in the late 1990’s, and has established an award-winning career as an artist working across socially engaged, interdisciplinary practice.

Solo gallery exhibitions include ‘Deep in The Heart of Your Brain’ at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow (2016), an exhibition that drew wide praise for the manner in which it addressed disability, inheritance and ageing, and Right Here Among Them (2017), a mid-career survey show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh that was the recipient of the inaugural Freelands Award. This practice includes public, site-specific projects and published artists’ books, with public commissions from NPRO, Oslo, Norway; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) Melbourne and Edinburgh Art Festival. In 2021 she completed new public works for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and Folkestone Triennial.

She has works in many significant national and international public collections, including Tate and the Arts Council Collection and has received major awards and funding from The Wellcome Trust, Creative Scotland and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

A long-term advocate of artists participation in governance, she has served as a trustee and advisor to a number of organisations including Scottish Sculpture Workshop, The Scottish Government Creative Industries Leadership Group and Fruitmarket Gallery, and has acted as a nominator, reviewer and judge for numerous awards including The Freelands Awards, Paul Hamlyn Awards and Fulbright Scholar Awards.

Supervision

Donachie is an active member of the Cultural Negotiation of Science Research group, established in Newcastle in 2013 to bring together artists, academics and research students whose practices engage with expert cultures across a broad spectrum of science and technology.

She is interested in hearing from potential PhD candidates working in research areas such as practice-led contemporary art, interdisciplinary working, inclusion and socially-engaged methods.