Dr Judith Aston
Senior Lecturer,
New Media Production, UWE

• Judith's Blog: http://21stcenturyfilmmaking.com/

Judith Aston is a Senior Lecturer in Film-making and Creative Media at UWE Bristol, and a co-director of i-Docs – the web-hub and international symposium for discussion and debate on the rapidly evolving genre of interactive documentary. As a creative producer with an academic background in visual anthropology and interaction design, she first began working in this field with the BBC Interactive Television and Apple Computing over twenty years ago and has retained her involvement in this area ever since. She is also currently working with film-maker Jeanie Finlay on Orion: Behind the Mask, a REACT funded Future Documentary Sandbox Project and is steering the creative development of the Russian Winter, an ambitious multiplatform project inspired by Bulgakov’s 1930s novel ‘The Master and Margarita’.

Judith is a multimedia professional with a passion for live cinema, interactive documentary and digitally expanded film-making. She holds a PhD in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art and a Masters degree in Social Science from the University of Cambridge. She is Co-Founder of i-Docs.org and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She works across academia and industry, balancing her work as a Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking and Creative Media with Producing and Directing, most recently for live multimedia events such as The Russian Winter and the Bristol Proms.​

Judith's practice and research addresses new possibilities for filmmaking brought about by convergence. At the heart of this is the human computer interface, an interest in multiple points of view, and a thirst for combining media with live experience. As a 21st century storyteller working at the cutting edge of design and media, she also has a background in anthropology. This brings a cross-cultural appoach to her work, which is reflected throughout her teaching, research and professional practice. She is an active member of the University's Digital Cultures Research Centre and Centre for Moving Image Research, and maintains a research blog at: http://21stcenturyfilmmaking.com​ ​

• Oldham, A. and Aston, J. (2013) Teaching multiplatform documentary. In: NAHEMI, Talking Shop, British Film Institute, July, 2013.
• Matthews, P. and Aston, J. (2012) Interactive multimedia ethnography: Archiving workflow, interface aesthetics and metadata. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 5 (4). Article 14. ISSN 1556-4673
• Aston, J. and James, W. (2012) Memories of a blue nile home: The photographic moment and multimedia linkage. In: Vokes, R., ed. (2012) Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives. Woodbridge, Suffolk. Rochester, New York.: James Currey, Boydell and Brewer Inc., pp. 104-123. ISBN 971847010452
• Aston, J. and Gaudenzi, S. and UWE Digital Cultures Research Centre (2011) i-docs website. Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE, Bristol .
• Aston, J. (2010) Transliteracy and polyphonic narrative: a case study. In: Transliteracy Conference, Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, Leicester, UK, 9 February 2010.
• Aston, J. (2010) Spatial montage and the enchantment of everyday life: towards the development of fluid interfaces for interactive documentary. In: Documentary Now! 2010, Birkbeck College, London, 15-16 January 2010.
• Aston, J. (2010) Spatial montage and multimedia ethnography: Using computers to visualise aspects of migration and social division among a displaced community. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11 (2). Art. 36. ISSN 1438-5627
• Aston, J. (2009) Direct cinema and a making of the ‘real’: polyphonic narrative, spatial montage and cinema-sincerity. In: International Jean Rouch Symposum, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 14-20 November 2009.
• Aston, J. and James, W. (2009) Still pictures, moving contexts. In: The Image Relation: Towards an Anthropology of Photography, Wolfson College, Oxford, UK, 11th November, 2009.
• Aston, J. (2008) Spatial montage, mutuality and diversity: New possibilities for ethnographic film-making. In: Mesaric, A., Repic, J. and Bartulovic, A., eds. (2008) Book of Abstracts, European Association of Social Anthropologists 10th Biannual Conference. Ljubljana, Slovenia: European Association of Social Anthropologists, p. 251. ISBN 978-9612372477
• Aston, J. (2008) Database narrative, spatial montage and the cultural transmission of memory: A case study from the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands. In: ISEA2009, The 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art, University of Ulster, Belfast, 23 August - 1 September 2009.
• Aston, J. (2008) Voices from the Blue Nile: Using digital media to create a multilayered associative narrative. Journal of Media Practice, 9 (1). pp. 43-51. ISSN 1468-2753