Dr Lizzy Orcutt
Lecturer
Elizabeth Orcutt is an academic artist working with photography and digital collage. Her practice centres on self-portrayal as a means of exploring visual subjectivity, often dispensing with likeness to question how the self is experienced through looking. She completed her PhD by practice in 2022, entitled Reflection and Photography: Images of My [visual] self, which examines visual self-experience as relational and intrasubjective rather than fixed in the subject or object.
She is a Cultural Studies lecturer at the Fashion and Textiles Institute. Alongside her academic role, she works with Fotonow CIC in Plymouth, supporting socially engaged photography projects that use visual practice as a tool for advocacy and community engagement.
Before moving into teaching and academia, Elizabeth worked as a picture editor in the news media, including at The Times, and has undertaken discrete editorial projects for organisations such as Reuters and Tortoise. This professional background continues to inform her critical approach to images, visual ethics, and contemporary photographic art practice.
External Links
Research Interests
Research interests and expertise
My research explores feminist self-portraiture and visual subjectivity through practice-based photographic methods. Working with photography, digital collage, and material processes, I investigate how the “visual self” is produced relationally through acts of looking, rather than secured through resemblance or representation. My work is situated within feminist theory, new materialism, and visual culture studies, and is concerned with questions of embodiment, ethics, and the politics of image-making.
Methodologically, my research advances practice-as-research approaches, using making as a critical and generative mode of enquiry. I am particularly interested in diffractive feminist methodologies, self-portraiture as a research tool, and the role of space, encounter, and spectatorship in the activation of photographic works. My background in editorial photography and picture editing also informs my research into image circulation, authorship, and visual power within contemporary media ecologies.
I welcome supervision enquiries in areas including feminist photographic practices; self-portraiture and autobiographical methods; practice-based and creative research methodologies; visual culture and image ethics; participatory and socially engaged photography; and interdisciplinary approaches that combine theory, making, and critical reflection. I am especially keen to support students working across photography, fashion, and visual arts who are using practice to think through identity, embodiment, and relational forms of seeing.
Research topics
- Feminist self-portraiture and contemporary photographic practice
- Visual subjectivity and the “visual self”
- Practice-based and practice-as-research methodologies
- Feminist theory, new materialism, and diffractive methodologies
- Embodiment, and relational forms of seeing
- Socially engaged photography and participatory visual practices
- Intersections of photography, fashion, and visual culture
Research Students
Number of research students supervised to completion
0Number of research degree examinations
1Policy engagement within Cornwall
Engagement with organisations which contribute to the development of educational, cultural or socio-economic policies in Cornwall
- Fotonow CIC
- Creative Looe CIC
- CAMP (Contemporary Artist Membership Platform)
- TAC CIC (Torpoint Artists Collective)
Professional Engagement
Independent professional practice
Social, community and cultural engagement
- Support of United By the Sea project by Creative Looe. Including photography for a fundraising calendar and community cookbook https://www.creativelooe.org/portfolio-collections/united-by-sea
Engagement with professional associations and societies
- APHE Conference 2025
- PhotoVoice training
