Dr Susan Kerrigan is a Creative Industries researcher and Screen Production Scholar at University of Newcastle. She has worked on international and nationally funded research projects on Creative Industries and Filmmaking. Her research approaches are qualitative and practice based in filmmaking, which is informed by her professional career as a television Producer, Director and Writer at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
In 2018, Susan began work on the ARC Linkage grant focused at identifying and explaining ‘creative hotspots’ across the nation. The project is lead by QUT Prof Stuart Cunningham. In 2018 Susan and her colleague A/Prof Phillip McIntyre delivered the final report for the ARC Linkage on the Hunter Regions Creative Industries, she also completed a UK, Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Networking grant called Film-making Research Network, with Dr Joanna Callaghan from University of Sussex, UK.
Susan is an ARC Reviewer, has peer-reviewed over 50 articles for international journals and has examined more than 14 PhDs and Masters (by research) for Screen Production, Screen writing and Television practices. Kerrigan has co-edited a collection ‘Screen Production Research:Creative Practice as a Mode of Enquiry’ (2018), with Professor Craig Batty, UTS and is co-editor on ‘The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production’ to be released late 2019. Susan has also co-authored a book on creative approaches to teaching with her UON colleagues called ‘Educating for Creativity within Higher Education (2018).
Dr Kerrigan and her research colleagues did very well in the recent national Impact and Engagement exercise in ‘Creative Arts & Writing’ Field of Research code 19 where The University of Newcastle (UON) received a HHH (3) score for the ‘Hunter Creative Industries as an Entrepreneurial System’ case study. That project was led by A/Prof Phillip McIntyre and A/Prof Susan Kerrigan. Only four other institutions in the country achieved a rating like this for FoR 19. The research was primarily funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant entitled ‘Creativity and Cultural Production: An Applied Ethnographic Study of New Entrepreneurial Systems in the Creative Industries’. The four year project was lead by Phillip McIntyre and its findings provide invaluable baseline data for the creative industries in the region. It has been taken up by policymakers. Those working in, and dealing with, these increasingly significant industries, either educationally, politically, economically or culturally, now know, through the project’s major report, exactly what the creative industries are, how they work and why they’re important, rather than making decisions based on guesswork or assumption. At a deeper level the research has helped expose and explain this regional creative system in action, what others have described as a dynamic innovation ecosystem.