LUCY FIFE DONALDSON

Lucy Fife Donaldson is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Lucy’s research focuses on film and television style, audiovisual design and ‘below-the-line’ labour, performance and the body, and videographic criticism. She is the author or co-editor of six books, including her monograph, Texture in Film for Palgrave Macmillan’s series: Palgrave Close Readings in Film & Television (Series Editors: Gibbs, John & Douglas Pye), Television Performance (Red Globe Press, 2019)  (co-edited with James Walters), and most recently, Epic / everyday: Moments in television (Manchester University Press, 2023) (co-edited with Sarah Cardwell & Jonathan Bignell). Lucy’s award-winning videographic work has been shown at international festivals and featured on the Sight & Sound best video essay lists of 2023, 2024 & 2025. 

Her current project is a videographic book on the contribution of film designers to the affective impact of film, foregrounding the personnel whose work is crucial in shaping our emotional and visceral responses to the world onscreen. Through this project she is interested in Using the affordances of the audiovisual to explore the sonic, tactile, material, and embodied dimensions of film design through the medium itself, the project’s form calls attention to design, affect, gesture and embodiment, and invents new aesthetic and conceptual strategies to connect archival, interview and cinematic materials.  

She is part of a videographic collaborative project, ‘Ways of Doing’ which fosters an ethical praxis of audiovisual research, with Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia), Dayna McLeod (Performance and media artist scholar) and Alison Peirse (University of Leeds). She is the PI of an AHRC-funded project: Ways of Undoing: Craft, Collaboration and Videographic Practice (2026-28). 

Publikationen:

  • ‘(dis) Orienting horror: Feeling queerly’, Monstrum, 7.2, 2024. (peer-reviewed) https://www.monstrum-society.ca/monstrum-v7-n2-december-2024.html
  • ‘Approaching the audiovisual design of Marie Antoinette (Laird’s Constraint)’ – produced for Ariel Avissar’s parametric summer series, 2024. https://vimeo.com/1003142287
  • ‘The movie business’ in Brown, Susanna (ed.) George Hoyningen-Huene: photography, fashion, film. London: Thames & Hudson, 2024, 268-305.
  • ‘“Precision is key”: appreciating the labour of performance in RuPaul’s Drag Race’ in Vermeulen, Tim & Kim Wilkins (eds), Metamodern pastiche dossier, Screen, 65.1, 2024.
  • Moments in Television: Epic / Everyday. Co-edited with Jonathan Bignell and Sarah Cardwell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023.
  • ‘Layers of Style: Design and Embodiment in The Americans’ in Bignell, Jonathan & Sarah Cardwell, Lucy Fife Donaldson (eds) TV Moments: Substance and Style. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.

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