MA Narrative Environments

People / Students / Jessica Barter

Jessica is a lifelong Londoner with a background in performance lighting design, technical management and activism. She’s currently studying MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins to begin to weave these threads together into a socially engaged practice focused on light in public urban space.

Since graduating from RCSSD in 2014 with a degree in Lighting Design for Stage, she’s worked on shows, club nights, installations and artwork. Alongside this, she’s worked as a technician and managed the technical delivery of a variety of live events and performance programmes. Between 2007 and 2015 she was also part of an activist group staging playful interventions in public space, from parties on the Circle Line to driving a tank into the City of London.

Inspired by the growing attention towards equitable and inclusive public lighting, she wants to develop a creative research practice that can contribute meaningfully to this movement. Building on a fascination with the process of ‘translation’ when working with performance lighting - from expressive, emotional vocabularies into technical ones - she currently has a particular interest in the language used to communicate experiences of light and dark.

Discipline: N/A

Year of graduation: 2022