Sally Jane Norman
(Director, Culture Lab, Newcastle/UK)
Sally Jane Norman is a cultural
theorist/ practitioner whose research is focused on live art and technology;
docteur d¹état (Paris III), co-/organiser of workshops, performances, and
seminars exploring human interactions in digital environments at the International
Institute of Puppetry (Charleville-Mézières), ZKM (Karlsruhe), STEIM (Amsterdam),
Ecole supérieure de l¹image (Angoulême/ Poitiers), IRCAM (Paris). Since September
2004, Director of Culture Lab, an interdisciplinary research facility at the
University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
She has served many organisations dedicated to transdisciplinary research, including the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal, the "Vida" Artificial Life Competition organised by Telefonica in Madrid, the Scientific Council of the Fine Arts Division of the French Ministry of Culture, and the Hexagram Creation and Research Committee in Montreal.
Sally Jane Norman
was born in Aotearoa/ New Zealand in 1953, where she studied music and dance,
and earned Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Canterbury.
She pursued her research in Paris with a Doctorat de 3ème cycle (PhD) at the
Institut d'Etudes théâtrales, Université de Paris III (1980), and a Doctorat
d'état ès Lettres et Sciences humaines (1990). Parallel to French and English
publications including studies for UNESCO and the French Ministry of Culture,
Doctor Norman has run live performance workshops with digital tools at the
International Institute of Puppetry in Charleville-Mézières, Studio for Electro-Instrumental
Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM)
in Karlsruhe, and European Festival of Digital Creation in Valenciennes. She
organised the 1992 New Images and Museology Conference at the Louvre, and
co-organised STEIM's 1998 TOUCH Festival and Symposium in Amsterdam, and IRCAM's
Dance and Technology session at the 2003 Resonance Festival. Doctor Norman
worked on EU R&D projects at the ZKM from 1996-1998 and became Director of
the Angoulême site of the Ecole supérieure de l'image (ESI) in 1999. Nominated
Director General of the school's two sites (Angoulême/ Poitiers) in 2001,
she launched ESI's pioneering Digital Arts Doctoral Programme.