Dr. Natalie Dixon is founder & director of affect lab, a award-winning creative studio and research practice based in Amsterdam.
Natalie is a born storyteller, researcher and writer with a passion for narratives from the margin. She has 25 years experience in the cultural and media fields with a current focus on how powerful creative tools can create more equitable and diverse public conversations about women's health. Natalie is co-founder of the international Bloody Beautiful movement for celebrating stories about menstruation and menopause using art and design.
Natalie’s career has been forged through an upbringing in South Africa and her background in independent journalism where she edited and published formative youth culture magazines, including South Africa’s first hip hop publication.
Latest Projects
2024 - ongoing / Requiem for the Impossible An interactive musical performance about ambiguous loss, based on the true story of 3 working sailors who went missing at sea.
2023-ongoing / Bloody Beautiful
A storytelling movement aimed at closing the gender gap in healthcare.
2023-24 / Ctrl. Alt. Img. A travelling photo booth using artificial intelligence and documentary to spark conversations about the inclusivity of generative AI images.
2022-23 / A City Eating Itself (in less than 10 minutes). A neighbourhood-specific fictional walk raising urgent questions about the influence of the platform economy on the social fabric of Amsterdam.
2019-ongoing / How to Tell a Herstory, a community based project that opens space for migration stories from the margins, told by women in conversation with machine learning.
Recent Publications
2024 (editor) Bloody Beautiful Playbook.
2022 (editor) Sensory Field Notes: Diary of a Dark Store Worker.
2021 Hybrid Spaces: Intimate Connections between online and physical audiences through gossip and dance. An affect lab publication.
2021 Friday Night in a Q-comm Warehouse on medium.com.
2021 What’s Up with WhatsApp?: A South African case study Institute of Network Cultures.
2020 Hey Honey: Are our domestic appliances gossiping behind our backs? And why does this even matter? on lacocinaarchive.info
2020 Why Should We Care About the Red Light District of Amsterdam? on Medium.com
2020 ‘Dick Tracy, Mad Men and Wall Street: A Brief [His]Story of Mobile Affect’ in Parole.cc
2019 ‘Refusing Shame and Inertia’ in Digital Culture & Society (December 2019) (PDF)
2018 Attached to My Phone: A Study of Affective Mooring in Mobile Practice (PDF)
2017 ‘Stranger-ness and Belonging in a Neighbourhood WhatsApp Group’ (2018) (PDF) in Open Cultural Studies – Special Issue on “Media and Emotions. The New Frontiers of Affect in Digital Culture”
Academic
>PhD from the Department of Media, Communications & Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
>MA in New Media & Culture from the Department of Media at the University of Amsterdam.
>BJourn (Bachelor of Journalism) from the Department of Journalism at Rhodes University, South Africa.