Rate My Professor Jill Bennett

Scientia Professor Jill Bennett is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of New South Wales. She is the Founding Director of the Big Anxiety Research Centre and a member of the leadership team of the Ageing Futures Institute within the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture. In 2017, she founded The Big Anxiety – festival of people + art + science, a research-driven mental health festival that received the Best New Event award at the Australian Event Awards in its first year. Her ARC Laureate Fellowship, which began in 2018, supports the transdisciplinary Felt Experience & Empathy Lab at UNSW, which focuses on psychosocial and creative approaches to mental health using immersive media and virtual reality to communicate embodied experience.

Bennett’s research centres on experiential media design, visual culture, trauma, and psychosocial approaches to mental health. Her publications include the books Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford University Press, 2005), Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affect and Art After 9/11 (Bloomsbury, 2012), and The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2022). She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2022. Bennett’s professional email address is j.bennett@unsw.edu.au.