Digital Media Arts PhD

Why choose this course

On our vibrant and expanding Digital Media Arts PhD programme, we embrace subjects that include: film, animation, visual effects, computational arts, video games, immersive media, digital acting, mediatised theatre, motion graphics, movement interfaces, performance capture, machine vision and interactive cinema. This provides you with an opportunity to undertake profound and meaningful practice-based and theoretical postgraduate research in these fields, where creativity and technology collide. Your skills and talents as a media practitioner, alongside intellectual curiosity, collaborative spirit, technical proficiency and sense of adventure, all come into play as you make use of the state-of-the-art facilities, great work spaces and dedicated multi-disciplinary supervision. You will also benefit from our extensive connections to the creative industries through our wide-range of partners within film production companies, animation houses, VFX facilities and studios. locally, nationally and globally.

On campus, we share a building and closely collaborate on a daily basis with the prestigious Guildford School of Acting. We also work closely with colleagues from Surrey’s Engineering programmes and have found touchpoints in nearly every other department Surrey has to offer. In addition to this, we are actively building relationships with other institutions close at hand and around the world, as we have found that collaboration and sharing is the only way forward for our precious arts, culture and technology communities.

This is a programme which will take you beyond the bounds of mere study. You will undertake your own ground-breaking artistic practice into exciting and emerging fields such as virtual production, digital performance, pervasive filmmaking, contemporary animation, immersive audio-visual, experiential installation, digital art, creative computing and AI-based media production. We will also help you develop your contextual and theoretical knowledge in these and related fields. As a contemporary media practitioner and theorist, you will be fully encouraged to engage with topical research on current artistic and media practices, diversities, accessibilities and cultural impacts.