Dr Lucy Thornett

Biography

Lucy Thornett is a Senior Lecturer in Scenographic Practices on BA (Hons) Design for Art Direction at London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts London. She is Research and Knowledge Exchange Coordinator for LCC Design School and academic lead of the Space and Place Research Hub.

Her research and creative practice explore scenography as a means of shaping, experiencing and understanding space. Working across immersive and site-specific performance, installation and exhibition, she investigates the relationships between bodies, environments, materials and technologies, with a particular interest in embodied audience experience. Her research encompasses extended reality (XR) technologies, digital materiality, and the spatial and sensory dimensions of performance. She is also interested in the expanding interdisciplinary applications of scenographic practice and its potential as a mode of knowledge production.

Her AHRC-funded, practice-led PhD at the University of Leeds investigated augmented reality (AR) scenography, exploring how AR reconfigures relationships between audiences, digital materials and physical environments. Bringing scenographic experimentation into dialogue with empirical audience research, the project contributes to understandings of embodied experience, uncertainty and agency in digitally mediated environments.

In 2023, she co-curated hello stranger: UK Performance Design 2019–2023 with Dr Kathrine Sandys (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama). This collaborative project brought together professional designers, researchers, higher education institutions and industry partners across the UK, encompassing a national festival of performance design, the UK exhibit at the 2023 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, and a three-part publication series with Performance Research Books. The project explored new ways of generating and sharing knowledge through scenographic practice, collaboration and exchange.

She is currently a member of the curatorial collective developing the UK exhibition for the 2027 Prague Quadrennial. Her wider professional practice includes designing sets and costumes for theatre productions and creating immersive, site-specific performances and installations. She has previously taught design at several higher education institutions in Australia.