MsTamara Voninski

Tamara’s research sits at the intersection of creative practice, visual storytelling, and arts‑based inquiry, with a particular focus on the embodied, material, and ethical dimensions of image‑making. Her work explores how photography and moving‑image practices can illuminate lived experience and the politics of representation. She works across documentary practice, experimental photographic processes, memoir writing, and hybrid moving image and visual forms to investigate how creative practice generates knowledge.

Her current research program includes three interconnected projects:

1. Searching for the Light: Embodied Creative Practice and Illness Narratives

This practice‑led project examines the lived experience of chemotherapy through experimental photographic interventions, including chemo‑graphy. The work explores how material processes, memoir writing, and the body’s changing conditions can generate new visual languages for illness. The project contributes to emerging scholarship on embodied creative inquiry, arts‑based health research, and the ethics of representing vulnerable bodies.

2. Memoir as Method in Creative‑Practice Education

Building on the reflective writing developed during Searching for the Light, this project investigates memoir writing as a pedagogical tool in film and photography education. It examines how narrative fragments, lived experience, and reflective writing can support students in developing creative intention, ethical awareness, and resilience. This research contributes to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) by proposing memoir as a framework for reflective, embodied, and care‑based pedagogy.

3. The Liminal Image: Still/Moving Images and the Female Gaze

This ongoing creative‑practice project explores the boundaries between still and moving image, focusing on how the female gaze can disrupt traditional visual hierarchies. Through slow cinema techniques, expanded photography, and installation‑based work, the project investigates temporality, gesture, and the politics of looking. It contributes to contemporary debates on feminist visuality, materiality, and hybrid image practices.

Across these projects, Tamara’s research aims to expand understandings of how creative practice functions as a mode of inquiry- one that can reveal embodied knowledge, challenge dominant narratives, and open new possibilities for visual storytelling. Her work is disseminated through exhibitions, creative outputs, peer‑reviewed publications, and practice‑led research presentations.