STAFF PROFILE
Professor Naomi Stead
Naomi Stead is a researcher and research leader working across the creative fields towards interdisciplinary research for social and environmental benefit.
Professor Naomi Stead is Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT, where she works with researchers across the creative fields to engage in interdisciplinary research leading to social and environmental benefit. Throughout her academic career she has been committed to research-based advocacy - into gender equity and work-related wellbeing in creative workplaces, and ways in which creative practice and education can respond to the climate and biodiversity crisis. She has been recipient of three ARC grants, including her current project, 'Architectural Work Cultures: professional identity, education and wellbeing' (2021-2024) which explores the work-related wellbeing of architects and architecture students, and the earlier 'Equity and Diversity in the Australian Architecture Profession: Women, Work and Leadership,' which led to the founding of Parlour, an internationally recognized leader in research-based advocacy towards gender equity in the architecture profession.
Stead is known as an innovative and transdisciplinary scholar, with a particular focus on social benefit to marginalised groups, including the LGBTIQ+ community. She is interested in forms of reflexive and situated writing – in the academic, professional, and essayistic realms, and transdisciplinary methodological explorations - of experimental methods, critical and subversive methods, and creative and speculative methods. She is particularly interested in questions of subjectivity and positionality, embodiment and situatedness, in both academic and creative non-fiction forms of knowledge production. In terms of topics, her research interests are broad – addressing the cultural politics of the creative arts; cultures of production, mediation, and reception in the creative arts; and innovative writing and research methods, in architecture and beyond.
Stead has edited or co-edited six books, including After the Australian Ugliness (NGV & Thames and Hudson, 2020) with Tom Lee, Ewan McEoin, and Megan Patty which won the Art Association of Australia and NZ 'best anthology' award in 2022; Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (Princeton Architectural Press 2019) with Janina Gosseye and Deborah van der Plaat; Writing Architectures: Fictocritical Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2020) with Hélène Frichot; and most recently Queering Architecture: Methods, Spaces, Practices, and Pedagogies (Bloomsbury, 2023) with Marko Jobst. She has also published prolifically elsewhere – and produced numerous Non-Traditional works including exhibition curation; industry reports and guides; book reviews and catalogue essays. In 2023 she was co-curator of Wild Hope: Conversations for a Planetary Commons, a major exhibition at RMIT Design Hub Gallery co-curated with Fleur Watson, Wendy Steele and Katrina Simon.
Stead has a significant profile as an architecture critic – culminating in her current roles as architecture critic for The Saturday Paper and featured contributor for the US-based Places Journal. She was formerly an architecture columnist for The Conversation. She was awarded the Bates Smart Award for Architecture in the Media for a series of essays published in The Saturday Paper throughout 2022.
Bachelor of Architecture, University of South Australia, 1999
PhD, The University of Queensland, 2004
- Cooper, B.,Shea, T.,Cox, J.,Stead, N.,Robberts, J. (2023). Material matters: concrete support and adaptability to work-related change during COVID-19 In: International Journal of Manpower, , 1 - 14
- Stead, N.,Gusheh, M.,Rodwell, J. (2022). Well-Being in Architectural Education: Theory-building, Reflexive Methodology, and the ‘Hidden Curriculum’ In: Journal of Architectural Education, 76, 85 - 97
- Gosseye, J.,Stead, N.,Van der Plaat, D. (2021). Alternative facts: towards a theorization of oral history in architecture In: Architecture thinking across boundaries: knowledge transfers since the 1960s, Bloomsbury, London, United Kingdom
- Stead, N.,Ednie-Brown, P.,Watson, F.,Rhodes, K. (2019). Exhibiting the Workaround Gender, Activism, and Architectural Education In: Journal of Architectural Education, 73, 193 - 201
- Stead, N. (2019). Pictures of architects: documentary photography, persona, and the visual evidence of work life and professional identity in architecture In: Non-Standard Architectural Productions, Taylor & Francis Group, Oxon, United Kingdom
- Stead, N. (2018). Celebrating the collective: Reflections on gender, diversity, the visual, and an attempt to capture a communal portrait of the architecture profession in Australia In: Architecture and Culture, 6, 123 - 144
- Stead, N. (2018). Queering Architecture: A Question-Manifesto In: Associations: Creative Practice and Research, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Australia
- Stead, N. (2018). On the expert and the amateur in online architectural commentary In: The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design, Routledge, Oxon, United Kingdom
- Stead, N. (2017). Within and Without Architecture In: Places Journal, , 1 - 10
- Stead, N.,Van der Plaat, D.,Macarthur, J. (2017). Building Flagships: Regionalism, Place Branding, and Architecture as Image in the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane In: Images of the Art Museum, Walter de Gruyter, Germany
3 PhD Current Supervisions
- Architectural Work Cultures: Professional Identity, Education and Wellbeing. Funded by: ARC Linkage Project Grants 2019 from (2020 to 2024)