Dr Vince Dziekan
Dr Vince Dziekan
Vince Dziekan (PhD, Monash; MA, Monash; GradDip Educ, Hawthorn Institute/University of Melbourne; Dip FA, ECCAD, Canada) is a senior academic and practitioner-researcher at Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), Monash University, Australia, and research fellow with the Institute for Digital Culture (University of Leicester).
Since taking up his tenured appointment at Monash in 2001, Vince has actively supported the development of the educational and research culture of the newly founded Faculty of Art Design & Architecture (MADA) across various academic leadership roles. He has held faculty leadership positions as Associate Dean Research, Associate Dean Education, and as Head of Multimedia & Digital Arts. He has served in departmental roles as the founding Director of Graduate Research in Design (where he provided academic and collegial leadership for research training across MADA’s design-based disciplines, including coordinating higher degree research (HDR) coursework units for PhD and Masters-level courses), academic coordinator of the Communication Design (Honours) course and for international programmes (overseeing the development, coordination and implementation of overseas study programmes through the Monash Global Campus Initiative with the Monash University Prato Centre in Italy). In his own supervision role, he has supported the successful completion of 40+ PhD, Master of Design by Research and Master of Fine Arts students, as well as numerous Honours projects. He has developed a range of innovative curricular programmes (i.e., the Prato Academy, introduced in 2023), led inter-faculty teaching collaborations (i.e., the University’s Digital Humanities initiative, launched in 2018), and coordinated industry-based collaborations (through establishing Memorandums of Understanding with the Venice Biennale and the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci) . His research is affiliated with SensiLab – an interdisciplinary research lab established between art, design and computer science – and he is a research associate of the Monash Data Futures Institute.
Vince’s research engages with the transformation of contemporary curatorial practices at the intersection of emerging design practices, creative technology and museum culture. The interdisciplinary scope of his research practice is represented in his books: Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition: Curatorial Design for the Multimedial Museum (Intellect Books, UK; University of Chicago Press, 2012), The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication (co-edited with Kirsten Drotner, Ross Parry and Kim Christian Schrøder; Routledge, 2018) and Museums and Digital Confidence and Museums and design practices (Routledge, forthcoming). Vince has published widely in traditional, scholarly formats (i.e., peer-reviewed journals and conferences) as well as in non-traditional modes through creative works and curatorial practice. He exhibited his demonstration exhibition, The Ammonite Order, Or Objectiles for an (Un) Natural History as a feature of ISEA2009, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and co-curated The World Is Everything That Is The Case (with Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas) for ISEA2011, Istanbul, Turkey, as part of the satellite program of the 12th Istanbul Biennial. Through his curatorial research he has been involved in establishing numerous curatorial initiatives and platforms, including MWX, the exhibition initiative of Museums and the Web (USA) (founded in 2013), the exUrbanScreens project (2012-13) and the Leonardo Electronic Almanac’s Media Exhibition Platform (introduced in 2010 with Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul). He maintains research engagement in the field at national and international levels. He holds an Honorary Research Fellowship with the Institute for Digital Culture (University of Leicester) where he is involved in establishing a set of international research observatories and academies focusing on cultural sector challenges and needs. Currently, he is co-leading ASSEMBLY (a national research development initiative exploring new forms of museum research collaboration in association with the Australian Museums and Galleries Association), and is a chief investigator for Future Museum (Austria). He has been engaged in numerous research projects – including serving as international advisor for 'One by One': building the digital literacies of UK museums (AHRC, 2017-20), numerous program and scientific committees (including The Art Museum in the Digital Age, The Belvedere, Vienna) and previously held research affiliations with the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, UK. He has served as associate editor of Curator: The Museum Journal (Wiley), and is currently leading publication programmes as general editor of The Encyclopaedia of New Media Art (Bloomsbury), and series co-editor (along with Ross Parry) of the Critical Perspectives on Museums and Digital Technology book series (Routledge).