About
Thirty years across international broadcasting, documentary production, and UK higher education. Currently working across film teaching, academic leadership, doctoral research, and emerging creative technologies.
I work as an industry practitioner, an academic leader, and a researcher at the same time, and each role feeds the other two. The same questions that have driven thirty years of work in front of and behind a camera are now driving a doctoral research programme, a curriculum design practice, and an educational venture.
I am currently Course Leader for BA (Hons) Digital Film Practice at MetFilm School, BIMM University, London, where I lead on programme design, student development, and the integration of contemporary industry practice into undergraduate film education. In parallel, I am pursuing an EdD in Creative & Media at Bournemouth University, with research focused on systemic reform of practice-based film and media education.
Before moving into higher education, I spent over two decades in senior roles across international broadcasting: as Production Operations Manager and Head of Programmes at Al Jazeera, Documentary Manager at Qatar Foundation, and earlier in my career at MBC London, BBC, ITV, NBC, SKY, Discovery, and Disney. That experience shapes everything about how I teach, lead, and think about what the industry-education interface should actually look like.
Research, venture & writing
Three outputs from one sustained inquiry into the future of film and media education.
My doctoral research addresses systemic reform of practice-based film and media education. The epistemological foundations draw on critical realism (Bhaskar, Archer) combined with practitioner realism (Schön), with key influence from Frayling, Haseman, and Nelson.
The methodology is what I call The Prototype Institution: I am building the thing I am researching. The venture is the research site, not an external observation point. This positions the work firmly within the tradition of practice-based and practice-led inquiry, with REF-eligible outputs already in development.
CutToAI is an independent film education platform operating on a B2B2C model: student-owned, institution-verified, industry-readable. The architecture includes five structural layers plus an AI companion layer, positioned as a longitudinal learning operating system. The first products — Production Pulse and CineStack — are in prototype, alongside the skills-passport architecture that forms the research core.
The core problem it addresses: film education's disconnection from industry realities, and the lack of diversity in voices, canons, and critical traditions. It proposes a skills passport and portfolio that follows students from pre-application through career launch.
A practitioner-facing guide moving through the full production arc, examining where AI serves filmmaking and where it introduces risk. Strong fiction/nonfiction distinctions throughout, with each chapter including a Filmmaker’s Toolkit and an Ethics Checkpoint.
The book operates in the same space as the research, not as a popularisation, but as a distinct mode of address aimed at working practitioners who are trying to navigate rapid change without losing their craft footing.
The EdD, the venture, and the book are not parallel activities. They are three registers of the same sustained argument: that practice-based film education needs structural reform, that the tools for that reform are available, and that the practitioner-researcher-leader is a coherent and necessary role rather than a contradiction.
Each output informs the others. The research produces the intellectual architecture; the venture tests it against reality; the book translates it for practitioners.
What drives the work
Intellectual and political commitments that shape every piece of work on this site.
The structural disconnection between film and media education and industry realities is the central problem my work addresses. I bring rare dual fluency in how creative industries operate and how higher education is evolving to serve them, and I am not interested in the gap being managed cosmetically.
Diversifying canons, critical traditions, and who gets to make and teach film. I treat equity as a curriculum-design challenge, not a recruitment one, a distinction I developed through my work at MAMA Youth Project, where the structural question was always: who is this curriculum designed by and for?
My EdD proposes a skills passport and portfolio that follows students from pre-application through career launch, a direct critique of the episodic, modular model dominant in UK film education. Learning does not begin at enrolment and end at graduation.
Live briefs, mentorship, and industry access are embedded in curriculum design, not added on top of it. Supplementary programmes are insufficient. The architecture of learning has to carry the commitment or it does not hold.
My methodology is The Prototype Institution: I am building the thing I am researching. Making and knowing are not separate activities. The venture is the research site; the films are forms of inquiry; the teaching is a mode of testing ideas about how practitioners develop knowledge.
Education & qualifications
EdD in Creative & Media
Bournemouth University, in progress (expected 2029)
MA (Merit) Filmmaking
Kingston University, 2017
BA Mass Communication
American University in Cairo, 1990
PGCert Education & Learning in Higher Education
University of London, 2021
Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Advance HE (AFHEA), 2021. SFHEA in progress.
Enhancing Programme Leadership Certificate
Advance HE, 2022
Certified Trainer, DaVinci Resolve
Blackmagic Design, 2025
Certified Instructor, Media Composer
AVID, 2023
Certified Film School Instructor
ARRI, 2022
Documentary Production Management
National Film & Television School, 2014
Adobe Creative Educator (ACE)
Levels 1 & 2
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Screen Industries
ScreenSkills, 2024
For speaking engagements, research collaboration, curriculum consultancy, or strategic conversation; get in touch.