Dr KJ Hepworth

Dr KJ Hepworth is a design researcher living and working on unceded Ngarrindjeri Land. Their transmedia work shows how power weaves between data, knowledge traditions, technology, and visual cultures. Known for journal articles and zines, their expansive academic and creative production spans academic writing, poetry, zines, data visualisation, explainers, illustration, augmentative communication tools.

Dr Hepworth's work opens up relational, somatic, and tactile experiences that transmute the tension between inherited creative and destructive experiences of power. Disability, gender, and sexuality marginalisations inform how their work centres access, engagement, and reciprocity. Central themes of this work are co-creating emancipatory visions of the future, and designing accessible tools to step toward them.

Dr Hepworth often collaborates with scientists. Previous partnerships include working with climatologists, physicists, and statisticians to design ethical big data processes; agricultural scientists and geographers to ethically visualise the science of developing drought tolerant crops; and with computer scientists and digital humanists to develop ways to reduce harm in visualisations of treacherous, sensitive historical data.

Dr Hepworth has given public talks about their work globally, including at MOMA in New York. Their work has been supported by  US organisations NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy Swinburne University of Technology

• Graduate Diploma in Graphic Design RMIT University

• Bachelor of Arts (International Studies) The University of Adelaide