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The artist, animated film-maker and curator Birgitta Hosea (b1965, Edinburgh) began her creative practice in film and drama while she was still at Glasgow University, before pursuing theatre design at Glasgow School of Art. Even at this early stage, Hosea was keen to push boundaries and explore the possibilities of cross-disciplinary practice. She later stepped sideways to undertake a course in computing and fine art, followed by an MA in digital imaging and animation, and these diverse disciplines have formed the bedrock on which she has built her expanded-animation practice. Hosea synthesised all these creative fields in her interdisciplinary-practice-based PhD (completed in 2012), at Central Saint Martins, on animation as a form of performance.

Hosea has had frequent invitations to exhibit her work, deliver presentations at conferences and teach and supervise PhD students at institutions across the world. She has been artist in residence at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Yarat Contemporary Art Space in Azerbaijan and the Centre for Drawing at Wimbledon College of Arts. She wrote and directed the MA course in character animation at Central Saint Martins from 2000 to 2015 while conducting research into animation as a form of performance, and then directed the Animation Department at the Royal College of Art from 2016 to 2018. She is now a visiting professor at Chengdu University in Sichuan Province, China, and a reader in moving image at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey, working with new technologies for storytelling, expanded animation and performance drawing.

Studio International visited Hosea in her studio in east London to talk about her creative practice and her solo exhibition Erasure currently showing at Hanmi Gallery Seoul.

Birgitta Hosea was interviewed by Studio International in September 2018.