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LGOODMAN

 

Prof. Lizbeth Goodman  (BA, MA, MLitt, PhD)
Creative Technology Innovation
Director, SMARTlab Digital Media Institute & MAGICGamelab

 

Professor Goodman directs studies for a group of professional new media artists and technology developers from SME, industry and the creative industry sectors. SMARTlab's customised live and online Practice-based PhD programme is noted as one of the world’s largest and most successful cross-disciplinary cohorts of higher level researchers, grounded in community need and creative industry theory and practice.
SMARTlab is an agency for social change, operating a core research unit and two wings spanning the nonprofit and creative industries sectors, with partners and funders in major NGO and Industry companies worldwide.

SMARTlab is the UK base for the MAGICbox Accessible tech programme, and for the Microsoft Clubtech Programme, which Professor Goodman has led in its critical review stages (as the largest project providing game and educational technology tools to over 4.3 million under-privileged young people worldwide).
     
Lizbeth is also known as a professional performer and presenter, with many years of experience in live and telematic writing, improvisation, performance and direction. She has worked extensively in comedy and theatre and television/convergent media entertainment, and has recently won commissions to create a new style of empowering online and live performance game. As a professional TV presenter for the BBC with many years’ experience, Lizbeth is a much sought-after public speaker for keynote lectures and main stage platforms, as well as for broadcasts.

Much of SMARTlab’s work focuses on the application of Universal Design methods to the domain of community inclusion and empowerment. It is head of the SPIRITLEVEL consortium – a group that has worked across national borders and disciplines to create bio-sensor and live performance experiences for children and adults in need of physical therapy and rehabilitation. One of the UK’s first major experimental biotech movement projects, premiered at the SMARTclub in 2002, is now known as Flutterfugue, in which Lizbeth dances with real and animated butterflies (in wheelchairs and in the air) worldwide, to an original responsive score composed by Nick Ryan of BBC Imagineering. New Projects called HOPE (Hospitals Online for Persistent/Pedeatric Environments) and TRUST (a bespoke role play game for children collaborating online, written by Lizbeth) will soon be launched on hospital networks around the world, each linked to a live performance. TRUST is currently funded by NESTA and is creating new games and expressive forms for children at the Stephen Hawking School, East London.
 
Lizbeth was previously Director of the SMARTlab Centre at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, and before that she founded and led the INMPR at the University of Surrey, following on from eight years leading the BBC Open University's multimedia research teams in Shakespeare, Drama, Gender Studies and Literature. She has worked extensively for the BBC as a researcher, writer and presenter of Learning and Arts/Media Programmes.

She is a regular reviewer/validator for many independent courses and broadcast programmes, for publishers of print and online packages, and for major funding bodies and award panels internationally. She currently chairs the SciArt Committee Awards Panel for the Wellcome Trust, and serves on the steering groups and funding panels of the EC (SaferInternet Plus and Digicult DGs), the Canadian Innovation Fund, et al.

Lizbeth is the author and editor of some thirteen books including a range of titles on women and theatre, the arts, representation and creativity. She has also written and produced a wide range of multimedia programmes ranging from educational CD ROMs and video/media packs to more experimental online performance events, including the Extended Body Project.

She has served as the Principal Investigator of the SMARTshell Project (creating innovative tools for synchronous and asynchronous online/integrated performance and learning), and of the Virtual Interactive Puppetry Project, the British Council's Cultural and Media Studies development programmes in North Africa, and the European Commission's RADICAL project (Research Agendas Developed in Creative Arts Labs). She collaborated on the dramaturgical elements of the EC and Telefilm Code Zebra Project in the UK (for which SMARTlab held the European Commission Culture 2002 Award), working with international partners at the BNMI, BBC, V2, UCLA, et al.

She is currently PI of the major InterFACES Project - putting a human face on new technology. She also holds current major awards to head teams funded by the BBC, Nesta and Microsoft.

While she has been known in the learning and e-learning communities as an expert in mediated and connected learning methods (since her award winning, best-selling work with the Open University and BBC in the 1990s), Lizbeth is now known equally as a scholar of new media practices that cut across learning, gaming, performance and social responsibility. Lizbeth is currently completing her own new book, which will kick off her new series for MIT Press on EMERGENC(i)es: new concepts and practices in media, technology and culture.
 
She regularly leads 'playshops' (or workshops involving an element of theatre game and costume, role play and movement experiment) for participants ranging from persistently ill children in hospitals, to corporate executives worldwide.

She won the Lifetime Achievement Award for Volunteer Service to Women and Children in 2003 (USA) and the 2003 and 2005 World Summit of the Information Society Performance Technology showcase awards. In 2007 she was nominated and won a commendation for her work serving people with disabilities using innovations in new technology. She is currently nominated for a Blackberry Women in Technology Award.

www.smartlab.uk.com
www.safespaces.net
www.give-trust.org
www.hopeconnectskids.org