Mr Stuart Mitchell

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About me

Stuart graduated from the Royal College of Art Film & Television MA course in 1997. His graduation film ('Stood for this Massive', about a big-time sports gambler) was shown at numerous film festivals, including IDFA, Sheffield DocFest and London Film Festival, and was subsequently broadcast by the BBC in 1998.

For the next 20 years he worked as a freelance Producer, Director and Lighting Camera on prime-time broadcast documentaries, primarily for BBC, Channel 4, ITV and Sky, working with many of the major independent production companies, including The Garden, Films of Record, October Films, Twenty-Twenty, RDF and Dragonfly TV. The programmes covered a range of approaches and subjects, but were mostly observational or authored films on contemporary social issues.

Since 2009 he began teaching part-time in higher education, as a Senior Lecturer in Documentary and Drama at UG and PG level, including courses at the National Film and Television School, Westminster University and Hertfordshire University.  In 2018 he became full-time Course Leader of Television Production at the University of Gloucestershire team and in 2020 joined UWE, where he has been Programme Leader of BA Filmmaking and MA Documentary Screen Production. In 2023, he became Associate Director of Filmmaking, overseeing all UWE School of Arts BA and MA Film courses, including MA Wildlife, MA Documentary and MA Screenwriting.

Since 2016 Stuart has also been active in research, with a particular interest in our emotional and cognitive response to Documentary. Within the empirical frameworks of Experimental Psychology, Neuroscience, Evolutionary Biology and Cognitive Film Theory, he has presented three papers at the Society of Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI), Birkbeck (Visual Psychology) and at a London Queen Mary Conference, curated by Mario Slugan on the Fiction/Non-Fiction Divide. He is continuing this research at UWE, focusing on our emotional response to "morally complex" characters within documentary and fiction. 


Area of expertise

Documentary, Film and Emotion

Publications

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