MA Creativity: Innovation and Business Strategy

Anna Kiernan

Co-director

Anna is a creative strategist, writer and publisher with over twenty years’ experience of working in the creative and cultural industries. Previously, Anna was the creative and editorial director at Stranger Collective, a creative content studio, a national advisor for Arts Council Wales and a Trustee for the Cornwall Film Festival. She recently acquired The Literary Platform, which the Guardian Professional/h.Club 100 listed as “one of the most innovative and influential” businesses in the creative industries. Anna delivers training and consultancy for clients including Lush cosmetics, The Guardian, Arsenal FC, the NSPCC, The National Trust and the Department for Transport. With a background as a fiction editor at Simon & Schuster publishing, Anna co-founded the MA in Publishing at Kingston. She thrives on curating collaborations and is experienced in partnership brokering, event programming, organisational change and business development. Anna’s research primarily focuses on writing culture and cultural value.

Dr Michael Pearce

Co-director

Michael trained at the Jacques Lecoq School of Theatre in Paris and has over fifteen years of experience working internationally as a theatre actor, director and facilitator. Michael has worked with a range of creative industry partners, including the BBC, the National Theatre and the British Council. He has presented work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the South African National Arts Festival, the Neuss Globe Theatre, Germany, the Glimmerglass Festival, New York and London’s Soho Theatre. His most recent project, a ten-part documentary about the history of black British theatre, film and television, was presented by Lenny Henry for BBC Radio 4. Before taking up his role as lecturer at the University of Exeter Michael was co-director of Fourth World Productions, a London-based international touring theatre company, and a member of Zimbabwe-based theatre company, Over The Edge. Michael’s research focuses on black British, postcolonial and diasporic theatre and he is the author of the book Black British Drama: A Transnational Story, which was shortlisted for the Society for Theatre Research Book Prize.

Olya Petrakova Brown

Drama lecturer

Olya is an actor, director and creative industries practitioner with over fifteen years’ experience. With an emphasis on creative entrepreneurship, Olya specialises in transforming disused urban and rural spaces into animated pop-up venues. With a track record in producing, curating, and organising festivals and conferences, Olya is passionate about cross-disciplinary working and community engagement. In addition, Olya is co-Artistic Director of ARTEL (American Russian Theatre Ensemble Laboratory), a visual theatre company, and founder/Co-Artistic Director of Maketank, a creative hub for contemporary performance making in Exeter. Her research interests include: hybrid art organizations, non-profit and social enterprise models and investigating the director’s Imaginarium by tracing the creation of work through visual texts and rehearsal notes.

Dr Stela Ivanova

Lecturer in Entrepreneurship

Stela Ivanova joined the Science, Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (SITE) department of the Business School in August 2019. She holds a PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and a MSc in Organisational Psychology from City University, London in the UK. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled Emotions, Decisions, Actions: ThePsychology of Entrepreneurship, uses psychological perspective to investigate the entrepreneurship phenomena. Stela’ current research interest is on the role of individual psychological constructs such as emotions, motivations and cognitions in the new venture creation process. She is also interested in how being involved in entrepreneurship activity shapes the individial and hopes to start research projects investigating this link.

Professor Lisa Harris

Associate Professor, Director of Digital Learning

Lisa joined the University of Exeter in October 2017 as Director of Digital Learning. She is also an Education Incubator Fellow.

Lisa has led the development and implementation of innovative degree programmes in three UK Universities, utilising cross-faculty expertise supported by industry projects and online learning pedagogies.

Previously Lisa was a Director of the Web Science Institute and a Director of the Web Science Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Southampton. She developed and ran an MSc in Digital Marketing there in 2009, and the UK’s first e-commerce degree programme at Brunel University in 1999.

Professor Ruth Sealy

Associate Professor of Organisation Studies, Director of Impact

With global academic expertise on women on corporate boards, Ruth’s research areas include women in leadership; board composition; role models; and various aspects of corporate governance. Ruth was the lead researcher of the annual Female FTSE Report, monitoring women on listed boards and executive committees, from 2007-2016, including co-creating the “100 Women to Watch” list at Cranfield in 2009. She has co-authored similar reports in Hong Kong and India and presented report findings to academic and practitioner audiences, globally. Working closely with the Government Equalities Office and Business Innovation & Skills department, Ruth and her team provided the data for the Lord Davies Review into women on boards 2010-2015.