Phoenix Art Space is delighted to announce that Judith Ricketts has been selected for the 2024 Phoenix Studio Award. The Phoenix Studio Award offers one year of support through rent–free studio space and other opportunities, to artists from under-represented groups and who experience intersecting forms of discrimination.

Judith Ricketts is an artist, serious games developer, Senior Lecturer in Games Art & Design, and Women in Games Ambassador. Working in collaboration with community groups, she creates and facilitates stories from data and archives to promote social wellbeing, in combination with emerging technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality, creating playful real-world, and immersive experiences for impactful social change. Recent works include XrH and Street Story funded by the IAA (Impact Accelerator Account) Cultural Alliance and Levelling Up, to map and create mobile-based iterative augmented reality experience about connections to the transatlantic slave trade in the Greater Brighton Area.

Upcoming projects feature augmented reality technologies in a mobile game created with a local charity to support mental health and wellbeing for young people. This innovative project is funded by Innovate UK and will be exhibited at the Jubilee Library in November 2024. Other work in progress includes a virtual reality experience building on the success of ‘Street Story’ which will work with Black and people of colour community members to create first-hand perspectives on data of the transatlantic trade and bring the data to life. This will be an ongoing project throughout 2024 /2025. Presentation of work in progress in March for International Women’s Day.

Click to find out more about Judith