Tuyet Mai Tran profile picture

Programme:

Design - MPhil/PhD

Start date:

Sep-22

Mode of study:

Full time

Research title:

On Homing. Exploring belonging between cultures through film and writing.

Biography

Mai is a practice based PhD student within the School of Design, ECA and the School of Health in Social Science. Her practice consists of first-person documentary filmmaking and autoethnographic writing.

She explores notions of home and belonging throughout lifelines of migration within three women-generations of her family from Vietnam to Germany to Scotland through filming and writing. Having come to filmmaking from a background in Psychology, part of her research consists of the psychological process of first-person documentary on the filmmakers themselves, in connection to psychoanalysis and the role of the unconscious and the role of dreams in creative processes.

Mai holds a MSc by Research in Health Humanities and Arts (University of Edinburgh, 2020) and a MSc in Psychology (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany, 2022).

Teaching

Mai is currently teaching on the postgraduate elective FilmMedicine and has shared her previous work as a guest teacher at Queen Margaret University on the Role of Art in Mental Wellbeing and the MASc in Creative Health at University College London.

Research

  • Autoethnography and first person documentary: how does text talk to film
  • Psychoanalysis and the filmmaking process
  • Intergenerational trauma
  • Ethical and sustainable approaches to research of the self