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UEA’s Strategy for Arts, Culture and the Creative Industries
Creativity in Action sets out UEA’s University-wide strategy for arts, culture and the creative industries. It explains how we will build on the research and teaching excellence which spans all our Schools, Faculties, Departments and Institutes, to catalyse new areas of partnership, research and creative enterprise, and to nurture talent and wellbeing across our campus, our region and beyond.
Introduction
Since UEA was first established, our guiding principle has been to ‘Do Different’ – the essence of creativity. Our iconic campus, designed by Sir Denys Lasdun, set the scene for a creative, interdisciplinary institution with raised decks and walkways linking faculties to spark new ideas by creating connections. This cross-curricular ethos is at the heart of our teaching and is vital to our understanding of the centrality of creativity to all areas of our research. We have long been world-renowned for our contribution to innovative teaching methods and to arts and humanities research and our experiential approach leads to excellent graduate outcomes. Our ground-breaking MA in Creative Writing is the oldest and most prestigious in the UK and celebrates its 55th anniversary in 2025. Our prize-winning alumni, including Ian McEwan, Anne Enright, and Nobel Laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, are some of the most distinguished voices of the contemporary era.
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Norwich is a nationally significant cultural and creative cluster. It is England’s first UNESCO City of Literature, and the only English city situated in a national park. Norwich is also home to an increasing number of digital creative businesses, a branding cluster, and an emerging European tech cluster, with a dynamic investment environment. Our campus is on Norwich Research Park, one of Europe’s leading centres for research in food, health and the environment. Clean energy, agri-food, financial services, advanced manufacturing and engineering are also among our strengths as a region. Our approach to creativity leads to dynamic collaborations with these very different sectors and industries, combining our world-leading research with the very latest commercial innovations.
UEA has a unique set of cultural assets. Our campus is home to the Sainsbury Centre, a world class museum with a unique perspective on how art can foster exchange, housed in one of Norman Foster’s earliest and most loved buildings. Our whole campus is a sculpture park that inspires our local communities. The British Archive for Contemporary Writing is a constantly evolving repository containing material from authors including Nobel Prize winners, best–selling crime writers, landscape writers and cutting–edge poets; the British Centre for Literary Translation is one of the leading centres for the study of translation in the world. The East Anglian Film Archive inspires new audiences through technological innovation, and UEA Publishing Project has imprints devoted to publishing cutting-edge fiction and the finest literature in translation, including Nobel Laureate Han Kang.
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We are proud to be a civic university, listening to the voices of our region and developing partnerships that open our expertise and our campus to all. We nurture our whole community: staff, students and citizens, and work with our partners to support our whole region’s impact and innovation and our diverse and outward- looking economy.
This leadership in creativity defines our research, our teaching and our way of thinking and is central to our vision: that UEA will solve the challenges of our changing world by working together sustainably. The arts illuminate our world and its people, and they have a vital role to play in the way our world will change, imagining and shaping our possible futures. But creativity is increasingly recognised as a significant force across disciplines – in areas as diverse as computing and business; the value of creative thinking and practice is central to the way we research and teach, and we engage actively across our Faculties and with our partners in the significant and fast-moving debate around the contribution or threat of AI to these processes.
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Creativity in Action sets out how we will build on this history of excellence and on our unique location – as an unrivalled centre of practice–based teaching and research in a county that sits proudly on England’s most Eastern edge – to catalyse new areas of teaching, research, partnership, and creative enterprise, and to nurture talent and wellbeing across our campus, our region and beyond. Our ambition centres around five core priority themes which are interdependent and will be developed in tandem:
We will be taking forward this work with our core partners:
Partners:
National Centre for Writing and UNESCO City of Literature
Collaborators:
The header image depicts... ‘Senseless’, a multi-modal play by James McDermott and Guildhall Live Events that fuses virtual sets and holographic avatars with stage actors and a theatre set. Part of ‘Future and Form’, a project celebrating the 50th anniversary of UEA’s Creative Writing programme. Photograph by Guildhall Live Events (GLE).