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Professor Naomi Stead is Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor, Engagement in the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT University. She is a researcher and research leader working across the creative fields towards interdisciplinary research for social and environmental benefit. Throughout her academic career she has been committed to research-based advocacy into gender equity and work-related wellbeing in creative workplaces, and ways in which creative practice and education can respond to the climate and biodiversity crisis. She has been recipient of three ARC grants, including her most recent project, 'Architectural Work Cultures: professional identity, education and wellbeing' (2021-2024) which explores the work-related wellbeing of architects and architecture students, and the earlier 'Equity and Diversity in the Australian Architecture Profession: Women, Work and Leadership,' which led to the founding of Parlour, an internationally recognized leader in research-based advocacy towards gender equity in the architecture profession.
Stead is known as an innovative and transdisciplinary scholar, with a particular focus on social benefit to marginalised groups, including the LGBTIQ+ community. She is interested in forms of reflexive and situated writing in the academic, professional, and essayistic realms, and transdisciplinary methodological explorations of experimental methods, critical and subversive methods, and creative and speculative methods. She is particularly interested in questions of subjectivity and positionality, embodiment and situatedness, in both academic and creative non-fiction forms of knowledge production. Her research interests address the cultural politics of the creative arts; cultures of production, mediation, and reception in the creative arts; and innovative writing and research methods, in architecture and beyond. Stead has edited or co-edited six books, including After the Australian Ugliness (NGV & Thames and Hudson, 2020), Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (Princeton Architectural Press 2019), Writing Architectures: Fictocritical Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Queering Architecture: Methods, Spaces, Practices, and Pedagogies (Bloomsbury, 2023). She has a significant profile as an architecture critic, with roles as architecture critic for The Saturday Paper and featured contributor for the US-based Places Journal. In 2023 she was co-curator of Wild Hope: Conversations for a Planetary Commons, a major exhibition at RMIT Design Hub Gallery. She was awarded the Bates Smart Award for Architecture in the Media for a series of essays published in The Saturday Paper throughout 2022.
RMIT University's Provocations series launches with a hard-hitting look at why gender equality remains central to Australian higher education discussions. Explore panel insights, pay gaps, leadership stats, and pathways forward.
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