Vanessa Marr

Vanessa Marr is Principal Lecturer at University of Brighton where she is a researcher and course leader. She is also practicing artist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She explores fairy tales from a feminist perspective, with a particular interest in their historical, feminine and domestic origins with links to storytelling as a pastime for women working with cloth. She has published extensively on the invisibility of female roles in motherhood and academia, including her chapter Cinderella: The Ultimate Domestic Narrative (Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations. Cambridge Scholars, 2020).
In addition to her writing, Vanessa often uses embroidery to weave together practices of autoethnography, drawing, creative writing, and craftivism through collaborative arts projects, personal artwork, academic publications, and exhibitions. She is particularly interested in the role of hand-stitch to invoke female narratives on the topic of domesticity. It is this research that first sparked her interest in fairy tales and she is well-known for her ongoing project inviting women to embroider their domestic experiences onto dusters (Instagram @domesticdsters).