Professor Shreepali Patel

Biography

Shreepali Patel is a BAFTA award-winning filmmaker, writer, and transmedia storyteller. Her practice investigates the convergence of human creativity, narrative led design and creative technologies that lead to new strategies and creative interventions to surface and empower diverse voices and perspectives. She explores both analogue and digital film, sound, music, photography, data visualisation, text and XR. She uses these and other storytelling tools to explore consciousnesses, memory and speculative futurism alongside their relationship to trauma, displacement, identity, culture, and cultural heritage to generate deeply connecting and powerful narrative driven experiences.

A former BBC producer/director, her research is underpinned by 30 years of broadcast and creative industry experience including C4, C5, Discovery and HBO, creating over a hundred films and BBC Radio 4 documentaries addressing diverse subject areas such as: conflict zones, political leadership battles, high security prisons, health service, intergenerational relationships, historical investigations to high profile royal and celebrity environments. As the first recipient of the United International Pictures & Women in Film and Television Directing Change Award, she was selected and mentored by director Roger Michell on the screen adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (Daniel Craig, Bill Nighy, Samantha Morton). Shortly after she won a BAFTA for Dawn, and collaborated with director, Geoffrey Smith, on the Emmy award winning, The English Surgeon (ost Nick Cave). She went on to form Eyeline Films with Smith.

She founded and directed StoryLab, an interdisciplinary research institute between 2017-2022, collaborating with international stakeholders in producing a slate of award-winning narratives fusing creative technologies, storytelling and platforms of experience. In 2023 she co-founded the Sonic Screen Lab, an interdisciplinary hub of creatives embracing a speculative and experimental approach to storytelling underpinned by addressing cultural and social change.

Her current research projects include: Threads, an intergenerational exploration of colonial and post-colonial memory, legitimacy and defiance through mediated technology and inherited textiles; and Reframe, using sonic based storytelling to reframe museum collections and reputations, with a focus on Tasmanian violence and the Thylacine during the 1800s. Her previous practice research projects include: The Golden Window – an immersive exploration of medical cooling of ‘baby J’ following traumatic birth (AHRC RIFA Award); The Crossing – a deeply layered and powerful cross-platform story on human trafficking, patron, Emma Thompson (BAFTSS Best Practice Research Award); Immersive Antarctica – a collaboration with the UK-Antarctic Heritage Trust & British Antarctic Survey to make their unique bases accessible through archive and game driven immersive storytelling (Knowledge Transfer Partnership; Stories in Transition – a series of co-created stories with veterans as they approach life after service (AHRC).; The Frontline – a living archive curating covid testimonies of UK and US healthcare workers told through their words, art, photography and music (AHRC seed); FoodCult: Drunk? Food, culture and identity of 16th century Ireland (ERC). In addition to her practice, she has co-curated a number of symposia, exhibitions and public events. Most recently, Televising Violence Against Women & Girls with Stacey Dooley and Mina Smallman with the Royal Television Society (East and London).

Through her practice, she provides consultancy on storytelling, narrative forms, co-creation and public engagement e.g Visual Memories of Migration, University of Groningen; Essex Police; NPCC Modern Slavery & Crime Unit; Justice & Care Unit; Medimed, Anhui TV, EsoDoc, NSoTA, NESTA, C4 and Seek, VR and NUFF.

She is a Visiting Professor, StoryLab aru; Associate of Cambridge Digital Humanities, Cambridge University; Advisory board of the Museum of Zoology, Cambridge University; Advisory Board, New School of the Anthropocene; Executive Committee of the British Association of Film and Television Screen Studies (BAFTSS); Mentor StoryArcs (AHRC); and Co-Director of Eyeline films with Geoffrey Smith.