New Centre for Practice Research in the Arts

Kingston School of Art is pleased to announce the establishment of the Centre for Practice Research in the Arts. 

This new research centre will contribute to key debates around the nature of contemporary art and design practices with a view to becoming a prominent advocacy voice for creative practitioners nationally and internationally. The founding director of the centre is artist, theorist, and educator Bill Balaskas – Director of Research, Business and Innovation at the School of Arts.

The Centre for Practice Research in the Arts will be grounded in Kingston School of Art’s long tradition in “thinking through making”—the guiding principle of the School for more than 140 years. In addition, the centre will build on the institution’s recent successes in the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021), which saw the area of ‘Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory’ achieve an outstanding performance: 87% of the research outputs submitted were ranked “world leading or internationally excellent”, with 55% being assessed as “world leading”. Notably, the majority of the outputs submitted by the institution were in the form of art and design practice research.

The new centre will incorporate multiple existing research groups working across creative disciplines: fine art, design, architecture, film, photography, performing arts, and beyond. Encouraging and enabling experimentation, the Centre for Practice Research in the Arts will explore how we can expand our collective and creative potential through combining innovative research practices.

Following a year of initial consultations, the key structures of the Centre for Practice Research in the Arts will be finalised through a series of dialogue-based processes that will extend throughout 2022–23. 

For further information, please contact the centre’s director, Dr Bill Balaskas: b.balaskas [at] kingston.ac.uk.

Kingston School of Art is an internationally recognised art school with a reputation for excellence and innovation in research across disciplines. The School is located a 20-minute train journey from the heart of London, on a campus that includes the Stanley Picker Gallery and the newly rebuilt extension designed by architects Haworth Tompkins. Kingston School of Art includes departments of architecture, film, photography, fashion, and product design. The School is part of Kingston University, whose neighbouring sites include the Visconti Music Studio at Kingston Hill, and the Town House, which was designed by Grafton Architects and won the 2021 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Prize as well as the 2022 EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Award. The School works closely with galleries, museums and institutions in London and internationally, including the ICA, BFI, LUX, and Chisenhale Gallery.