Shona Thomson (BA (Hons) Screen Studies, FOCAL International Award)

Lecturer

Biography

Background

I am an award-winning curator and producer with over 20 years’ experience of working professionally in film exhibition across the UK and internationally.  My background in film exhibition is rooted in the professional organisation and creative collaboration I create and deliver in live cinema with performance and other big screen projects under the banner of A Kind of Seeing.  I have presented film events in all kinds of venues from the University's Playfair Library and city centre cinemas to rural village halls and mobile cinemas.  I have a passion for connecting people with places through archive film and live performance - using the past to talk about the future.  I am the Applied Learning lead in the teaching staff of the MSc in Film, Exhibition and Curation.

Since graduating with a first class BA Screen Studies with Honours from Liverpool John Moores University in 1999, I have cultivated a parallel career that has brought me to be both a film event Producer and a Curator. The Producer came from working for ten years as a Personal Assistant in non-film sectors such as property development and libraries.  And the Curator came from working as a programmer at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, then going self-employed to specialise in silent and archive cinema to produce the first five years of the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival in Bo'ness. 

Since leaving the HippFest (as it's affectionately known) in 2015, over 8000 people from Shetland to Hanoi have participated in A Kind of Seeing projects that have variously involved me:

  • Supporting communities to curate their own stories

  • Curating and editing re-purposed archive films

  • Facilitating workshops & teaching event production

  • Strategic cultural planning

  • Producing live film soundtrack performances

  • International film exhibition consultancy & research

I also currently work part-time as a Partnership Coordinator for Scotland's cinema development agency Regional Screen Scotland: www.regionalscreenscotland.org. For more information about my work, please go to www.akindofseeing.co.uk.

 

Postgraduate teaching

My role in the MSc Film, Exhibition and Curation teaching staff is to lead on delivering Applied Learning to the whole year group with Programme Director Susan Kemp, support my teaching colleagues on the programme, and as a professional mentor offer students guidance and advice from my own 20 years of experience working in the film exhibition sector in the UK and internationally.  Throughout the year, I’ll be available at allocated times to answer questions about working in the sector.

 

Project activity

For a full list of the projects I've worked on through A Kind of Seeing, please go to: https://www.akindofseeing.co.uk/projects.

 

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