Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Joanna Leah
Senior Lecturer
Dr Joanna Leah is an artist, academic, and researcher in expanded drawing with choreographic tactics in diagrammatic drawing, writing, installation, and performance. Her drawing practice blubilds draws out and fractures the narratives of place and ecologies through dynamic interactions.
Informed by Post-Human, New Materialism and feminism converging with Art concepts of formlessness, Joanna's work engages dynamic agencies to reveal complexities of place, ecologies, and systems as minor political and poetic gestural critique. Her recent work has been exhibited with the Drawing Research Network in two international exhibitions on Drawn to Time and Drawing Ecologies in Situ and the publication Blubilds: drawing diagrammatic stains with Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice with Intellect.
Joanna works as a Senior Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies for Undergraduate Art and Design and Creative Research Methods for Masters postgraduate courses in Art, Design, and Architecture. Teaching engages research-enhanced approaches in diagrammatic writing and visual organization, collaborative pedagogies, and the praxis of theory and practice in course development, workshops, and research groups. She is part of the DRN Drawing Research Network and Research Group Drawology.
Current Teaching
- Undergraduate Critical & Contextual Studies: Product Design, Interior Architecture
- Postgraduate Module: MA Creative Research Methods with Fine Art, Graphics, Fashion, Fashion Marketing, Architecture and 3D Design
- Previous teaching at LBU includes: Graphics, Fashion and Fashion Marketing
Research Interests
Drawing methods are interdisciplinary, falling between Fine Art and Dance situated in Expanded Drawing Practice. Joanna’s work is particularly engaged with Edgeland's rural/urban wilds as the neglected ribbons of our cities. More recently, research has engaged with other edges, extending notions of Edgelands to maritime Edgelands. Her work with movement analysis has taken her to the water edges in observing systems in relation to people, place, and ecologies, and she is especially interested in ecologies of algae and birds' migratory patterns in relation to the shifting movement of water-shaping land as drawing spatial critiques. This work involves drawing as building the score, graphic scores, and live scores in walking practices, and films in situ, working towards immersive drawings in film.
Joanna is a core member of the Wise Women Network, LBU, established in 2022 to strengthen, empower, and foster research trajectories for mature women, delivering workshops and events. This has shifted to converging two research interests Water movement systems with Mature Women examining women and wild water swimming in Ireland and inland UK in studies of parallel ecologies.
The development of drawing ‘with’ and ‘in correspondence’ has led to being part of the Research Group Drawology (DRN Drawing Research Network), which explores online collaborations and drawing across ‘the ether’, and joining the Small Islands Studies with specific attention on water habitats, bodies of water and effects of climate change on small islands.
Ask Me About
- Critical Spatial Practice
- Diagrammatic Drawing
- Drawing Ecologies and Correspondences
- Drawology
- Edgelands
- Embodied Research and Embodied Figures
- Feminist new materialisms
- Located Body
- Maritime Edgelands
- New Materialism
- Notation
- Radical Drawing Practices
- Slow Reading Research
- Walking practices and dance
- Art
- Culture
- Design
- Diversity
- Education
- Feminism
- Performing Arts
