Kerry is Dean of the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art. She is also Acting Dean of the School of Design.
A member of the RCA Executive Board, Kerry Co-Chairs the Race Equality Charter – Self Assessment Team and is Chair of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
Kerry is responsible for the academic leadership, vision and strategic direction of the School of Communication, linking industry, innovation and research with taught postgraduate programmes, research degrees and the student experience.
Prior to working in higher education, Kerry worked as a designer for Alberta Ferretti, Valentino and Nina Ricci, and developed work for brands such as Chloé, Stella McCartney, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Givenchy, Dolce & Gabbana, Lanvin and Fendi.
In her current academic research, she creates fictional participatory scenarios responding to climate impacted emergencies. Kerry leads a cross-college Immersive Communication Research Group which positions itself at a technological forefront to ask how recent advances, paired with traditions of immersivity, can ethically form connections between individuals, communities and organisations, ensuring an intersectional approach.
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Through participatory scenarios Kerry’s research, Imagining Neutopia, fabricates and documents fictional events to further Climate Change discourse.
The most recent project Dressing for Evacuation focuses on and offers insight into the human emergency response of getting dressed and gathering a limited selection of possessions. Participants were asked to dress as if they had been alerted to an imminent large-scale evacuation, responses were recorded in a photoshoot and accompanying survey. The project culminated in a series of life size photographic portraits, shown as part of the Tentworks exhibition at the Feverish World Symposium, 2018 in Vermont, USA, and the Fashion and Textiles FutureScan 4 Conference at the University of Bolton, UK in 2019.
Achieving post pandemic relevance, Dressing for Evacuation offers insights into our potential responses to a major disaster, shedding light on what clothes and objects we might deem essential, and suggesting an imminent re-evaluation of our relationship to the ‘clothes on our back’ and dressing for survival.