Ellie Neason
About the researcher
Ellie Neason is transdisciplinary artist with a practice spanning performance, film, writing and installation. Ellie’s work explores the body as a perceptual site for understanding and investigation. Aiming to highlight the liberational potential of embodied conversation, they explore the ways we perceive and understand lived experiences in and through technological worlds. Investigating slippages of the body and spaces for corporeal agency in modern social, political and physical landscapes, their practice currently examines the co-production of identity, culture and consciousness with intelligent technologies through the lens of nomadism.
Ellie holds an MFA with Distinction from Newcastle University, where they were awarded the John Christie Prize for Academic Achievement and the CASS ART Annual Exhibition Award (2024). As an artist, they have exhibited and performed internationally, with publications and research presence spanning ethics, creative AI, and embodied practice across Europe.
Research interests
Performance, Art History, Gender Studies, Subcultural Studies, Posthuman Theory, Creative AI, Immersive installation.
PhD abstract
Thesis title
Nomadic Bodies in Digital Territories: Somatic Connection and Embodied Encounters in Posthuman Geographies
Abstract
This practice-led research aims to interrogate the emergence of Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjectivity in everyday entanglements between the body, technology and society. Drawing on my own lived experiences, this research employs autoethnographic methods, to offer nomadic life as a subject matter, epistemology, and analytical lens.
By demonstrating nomadic subjectivity as a performative, decentring action that exposes the fragility of settled spatial logics, I aim to disrupt normative structures of permanence, labour, and ownership, and generate new epistemic ground. Through iterative performative dialogues with AI technologies, this research exposes corporeal troubles in posthuman theory by thinking through the relational and theoretically generative body. Here, nomadology is mobilised, not as romantic wandering but as decolonial praxis.
By co-creating immersive installations with AI technologies and nomadic community members, the research will interrogate intelligent technologies (AI's) function as an affective agent in the co-production of knowledge systems, exploring how visceral and affective encounters in human and nonhuman entanglements might open new opportunities for decolonising posthuman geographies within post-capital pedagogical and cultural practices.
Qualifications
| Year | Qualification | Awarding body |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | MFA | Newcastle University |
| 2019 | BA(Hons) Fine Art | University of Plymouth |
Honours & awards
| Year | Qualification |
|---|---|
| 2024 | Annual Exhibition Award, Cass Art, UK |
| 2024 | John Christie Prize for Academic Achievement, Newcastle University, UK |