Sally Jane Norman - Director New Zealand School of Music - Student from 1966 - 1970
Saturday, 8 October 2022
Sally Jane Norman returned to Aotearoa in 2017 to direct the New Zealand School of Music–Te Kōkī, leading NZSM’s interdisciplinary programmes linking theory and performance. She remains Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex, where as Professor of Performance Technologies she was co-founding Co-Director of Sussex Humanities Lab.

Before SHL, Sally Jane was academic lead on Sussex’s £10M refurbishment of the Basil Spence-designed Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts; this academic/ infrastructure mission drew on her experience as founding Director of Culture Lab at Newcastle University (UK). Other past roles include EU Research Associate at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Artistic Co-Director of the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (Amsterdam), Director of the Ecole européenne supérieure de l'image (Poitiers-Angoulême), and Scientific Coordinator of the Louvre's International Symposium on New Images and Museology. BA and MA studies at Canterbury, New Zealand, were followed by doctoral research at the Institut d'études théâtrales, Paris III - Sorbonne nouvelle (doctorat de 3e cycle, doctorat d’état), inspired by summer schools with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and John Cage.

Sally Jane's publications and papers in English and in French address performance history and emerging practices, art and technology, and transdisciplinary research. Commissioned reports include a paper on 'Culture and the New Media Technologies' for the Unesco Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policy for Development, and on 'Transdisciplinarity and the Emergence of New Art Forms' for the French Ministry of Culture. As a Kiwi-French dual national, Sally Jane serves on research organisations throughout Europe, Australasia, and North America, including the European Research Council and European Science Foundation. She has examined doctorates in New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark, with a strong focus on practice-led research.