Birgitta Hosea

Birgitta Hosea (born 1966) is a British artist, curator, and researcher of Scottish and Swedish descent. She is a pioneer of expanded animation, a practice that moves animation beyond the screen and into live performance, installations, and digital media, and "performance drawing," where the process of making a drawing is the end result. She currently serves as Professor of Moving Image and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA).^[1]

Hosea was born in Edinburgh and raised in a household without a television, which she credits for her early immersion in drawing and craft with her mother. She studied drama, film, and TV at the University of Glasgow (MA, 1986) and theatre design at the Glasgow School of Art (Postgraduate Diploma, 1987).^[2]

Before moving into academia, Hosea worked in the art departments of major film productions, including Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (1988) and Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990). In 1999, she completed an MA in Computer Imaging and Animation at London Guildhall University, followed by a practice-based PhD from Central Saint Martins in 2012 titled Substitutive bodies and constructed actors.^[3]

Hosea served as the Course Director of MA Character Animation at Central Saint Martins from 2000 to 2015. In 2015, she was appointed Head of Animation at the Royal College of Art, where she led the department for two years.^[4]

In 2018, she joined the University for the Creative Arts as Professor of Moving Image. She is also the Director of the Animation Research Centre (ARC), where her research focuses on the intersection of animation, performative drawing, and immersive technology.^[5]

Hosea's work combines traditional drawing with high-tech elements like holographic projection, laser pens, Generative Adversarial Networks, and immersive screenings. In 2025, her work Holes was re-engineered as a 360-degree immersive environment for the exhibition Momentum at the Krupa Art Foundation in Poland.^[6] Her solo exhibition Erasure (2018) at the Hanmi Gallery in Seoul explored domestic labor through performative drawing.^[7]

Her work is held in the permanent archives of Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Centre d’Arte Contemporain in Paris.^[8]

• Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (2020) – Co-authored with Foá, Grisewood, and McCall. Bloomsbury.
• "Made by Hand" in The Crafty Animator (2019). Palgrave Macmillan.
• "Siting Animation: The Affect of Place" in Experimental and Expanded Animation (2018). Palgrave Macmillan.
• "Drawing Animation" (2010) in Animation, 5(3).

• Official website
• Faculty Profile at UCA
• ResearchGate profile