Early career researchers: meet Dr Susanne Thurow

Dr Susanne Thurow is a researcher at iCinema – UNSW’s Centre for Interactive Cinema Research where she explores how immersive technologies can help people make sense of environmental crises.

Her ever-evolving research journey has seen her move from literary studies, to theatre practice, then to Indigenous cultural production, and digital media. And now all these strands play a part in her work on immersive ‘climate aesthetics’ where creative practice and advanced technology work together to engage audiences emotionally and intellectually.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself? 

Since 2021, I’ve been an ARC Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate Director (Creative Arts Research) at the iCinema research centre. Alongside my research role there, I represent the Centre on the ADA Faculty Research Committee, am part of the UNSW Bushfire Research Group, and have served as peer reviewer for journals and funding bodies including the Australian Research Council, Theatre Research International and ACM VINCI. 

My PhD was in Literary and Theatre Studies, but over time my work expanded into the fields of Performing and Media Arts, with a focus on digital aesthetics. My PhD explored aesthetics in theatre, namely how Indigenous identities are staged in contemporary Australian performing arts, with a particular interest in the impact of devising processes and cultural protocols.  

My love of theatre actually predates my academic career –before emigrating from Germany in 2011, I worked at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater in marketing, and later in Australia as Associate Arts Manager for Big hART Inc.  

I was able to carry the focus on performing arts into my work at iCinema by collaborating as Chief Investigator on the iDesign and iModel ARC Linkage projects which explored immersive interactive set and rehearsal design approaches with Sydney Theatre Company, NIDA and Opera Australia.  

Currently, I’m exploring how art, design and performance can best leverage advanced immersive technologies to reimagine our relationship with climate processes, helping us experience and make sense of environmental crises in new and meaningful ways. 

What or who sparked your interest in this area of research? 

I’ve always been fascinated by the way immersive digital aesthetics, when carefully thought through and skilfully executed, can open up and transform possibilities in creative practice. Productions like Kip Williams’ The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Sydney Theatre Company, 2018) or Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s installation Berl Berl (Berghain, 2021) show just how powerful such approaches can be in expanding how we engage with ideas. 

When I joined iCinema, I had the opportunity to translate many of the theoretical frameworks I’d worked with in my PhD and Masters research into new contexts, focusing not only on theatre, but engaging with advanced interactive visualisation and its underpinning systems.

It has been a steep and incredibly rewarding learning curve, made possible by the unwavering guidance and mentorship by iCinema’s Executive Director, Dennis Del Favero who has continually provided opportunities for growth throughout the years – something I am deeply grateful for. A decisive influence has also been the expertise and generosity of the wider iCinema team, including Yang Song, Michael Ostwald and Carol Oliver and many more, who generate a vibrant, collaborative research culture.   

Living on Kai’ymay Country, I spend much of my spare time surfing, which inspires my own environmental awareness and desire to address the challenges flowing from climate change. My research into digital climate aesthetics is, in some ways, a way to channel this by seeking to understand how creative practice and advanced technology can come together to engage audiences in ways that are emotionally resonant, intellectually rigorous – and urgently needed. 

What are you working on right now? 

I’m currently in the final stages of my postdoctoral fellowship – which wraps up in December. 

One of my main projects is editing a book for UNSW Press that reflects on the outcomes of Dennis Del Favero’s ARC Laureate project, which has been my primary research focus in recent years.

As part of this work, we collaborated on a new aesthetic approach for visualising extreme fires, capturing their unpredictably dynamic behaviours by drawing on advanced immersive interactive systems and AI-based data modelling.

This approach underpins creative arts applications, like the Penumbra installation at this year’s Melbourne Design Week, and a novel training simulator now in use by Fire and Rescue NSW at its Emergency Services Training Academy to strengthen situational awareness skills. The book brings together contributions by leading and emerging voices in creative arts, emergency management, computer and fire science, and is due for publication in September 2026. 

I’ve also just returned from a short research fellowship at a Centre for Advanced Study at the University of Münster in Germany, where I extended my exploration of digital climate aesthetics. This strand of my work analyses performing and media arts to understand how immersive digital aesthetics can enable visceral perception of our entanglement with climate systems, drawing particularly on the theories of Elizabeth Grosz and Bruno Latour. This extends my most recent article published in the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English and is shaping the next phase of my research beyond my postdoctoral fellowship. 

What do you find most rewarding about being a researcher? 

One of the greatest rewards of being a researcher is the opportunity to constantly explore – to help build new knowledge and new ways of engaging with the world. Research has given me the freedom to reinvent myself more than once: from a Masters in teaching with a focus on literary studies, to work in theatre practice and Indigenous cultural production, then into digital media and its industry applications, and now into climate aesthetics, which in many ways brings together strands of my expertise that once felt separate.  

The interdisciplinary nature of my work, and iCinema’s close links with industry, mean there’s always fresh input and new challenges to respond to. I love that this requires regularly rethinking concepts and approaches, and pivoting when needed, to address emerging questions in creative and impactful ways. 

Another aspect I truly value is the people. Research has introduced me to extraordinarily interesting collaborators across disciplines and sectors. Those conversations don’t just help me grow professionally, they’ve also shaped me personally. Engaging with people whose perspectives differ from mine forces me to articulate the assumptions behind my own practice, to reflect and adapt, and to build common ground as the basis for meaningful collaboration. 

What piece of advice would you give to someone who is considering or about to transition into academia? 

One thing that’s been invaluable for me is pushing myself to step out, meet people and start conversations. Those moments of connection have often sparked new ideas and led to opportunities I could never have planned for. 

For example, in 2011, I happened to interview playwright and director Scott Rankin at a festival in Rotterdam. This chance meeting led to an invitation to participate in the creative development of a new work with the Roebourne community in Western Australia. This experience, and the insights I derived from it, ended up shifting my PhD focus from a largely script-and staging-based analysis of theatre plays to a broader consideration of creative processes and protocols. This approach became one of my key contributions to scholarship at the time. 

As a natural introvert, those first steps into unfamiliar territory were daunting. But in hindsight, they were absolutely worth it. Open, genuine conversations can reveal gaps in knowledge you didn’t know were there, and those kinds of conversations can become seeds for exciting collaborative research. They help you build a community around your work – one that gives it reach and relevance beyond your own immediate field.

If you’re just starting out, I’d encourage you to take those small risks to connect with others. You never know which conversation will open a door you didn’t realise existed.