Doctor Samantha Edwards-Vandenhoek

Samantha Edwards-Vandenhoek is an award-winning graphic designer, photographer and academic. She lectures in visual communication in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts. She is the program coordinator of the multi-award winning capstone design studio program, officially recognised as the ‘Rabbit Hole’. In 2011, Samantha was the recipient of the prestigious Vice Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award for spearheading a situated and engaged learning experience. The Rabbit Hole is founded on an innovative pedagogical model that fosters creativity through experimentation and collaboration. Down the Rabbit Hole, Samantha aims to inspire, empower and encourage students to produce authentic, innovative and socially conscious media and communication responses. As an educator, Samantha believes that by engaging design and photography students in meaningful collaboration with social, political and environmental issues they learn to become empathetic creative practitioners and design thinkers aware of the inherent power of visual communication to shape the world in which we live.

Down the ‘Rabbit Hole,’ students get the opportunity to work on ‘real life’ industry projects with community organisations, communitiy bodies, UWS clients, external tertiary design institutions, not-for-profit organisation and advocacy groups. Students are required to develop, through directed and focused research, a response to a given creative brief from the client as a ‘junior designer.’ A number of briefs are offered each semester and each student is allocated a role, based on their existing expertise and areas of interest in working with specific media and communication fields. This Rabbit Hole studio services a range of internal and external clients, local bodies and community organisations such as TVS, Western Sydney Public Transport Users, RMIT University, The Dept of Music, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre and UWS Equity & Diversity. 

For more information please visit www.commarts.uws.edu.au/rabbithole

Samantha also has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree from the University of Sydney and Diploma of Design from Billy Blue School of Graphic Arts. She has extensive industry experience, working as a designer for two of Sydney’s leading branding consultancies – Billy Blue Creative and EKH Design.

Samantha has guest lectured at Parsons School of Design in Paris. As a photographer she exhibits her work widely both in Australia and Europe and is represented in Paris by Galerie Emotion.

Samantha's research interests and expertise traverse visual communication studies, digital archaeology, photomedia, visual culture and place-making. Samantha’s practice-based doctoral thesis, completed in 2012, is Graffiti Achaeography: The poetics of engagement in Sydney’s inner suburbs. This practice-based research is centered on a ten year investigation which seeks to map, photograph, decipher and archive the differentiated and fragmented material traces of graffiti writing and urban art to illuminate Sydney’s contribution to the global graffiti subculture. Post completion, this research is now focused on how the Sydney Graffiti Archive, as a dynamic and agile virtual interface, further intervenes in, reshapes and transforms the experience of graffiti to re-imagine graffiti’s place as digital heritage. 

This information has been contributed by Doctor Edwards-Vandenhoek.