Nicola Zena Lumley is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and digital arts practitioner whose work spans sound, moving image, electronic and electroacoustic music, multimedia performance, creative education and collaborative arts practice.
Her practice has its roots in the early 1990s, when she was at the forefront of the emerging digital arts scene. For more than thirty years she has explored the creative potential of collaboration, interdisciplinary practice and new artistic forms, developing projects across sound, moving image, performance, digital media and cross-artform contexts while continuing to expand her practice through experimentation, collaboration and new creative contexts.
Her work has been commissioned by filmmaker Tina Gharavi and theatre director Nina Hajiyianni, produced by Forma Arts and Media, and presented nationally and internationally through exhibitions, festivals, cultural programmes and performance contexts including FACT Liverpool, Dance City, commissioned work at Tramway Glasgow, the Red House Centre for Culture and Debate in Sofia, and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, with key projects supported by Arts Council England.
Alongside independent artistic practice, Nicola has composed music and sound design for film, animation, contemporary dance and theatre. She composed and co-created the soundtrack for Tina Gharavi's documentary Closer, which received the Czech Radio Award at the Prague One World Film Festival — the jury singling out its innovative use of sound and music. Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 3's Mixing It, BBC Newcastle and Radio Sofia.
Throughout her career she has also undertaken artist residencies, guest lecturing, mentoring and the design and delivery of specialist creative learning programmes alongside her artistic practice, including residencies with Dance City, Helix Arts and Durham City Arts, and work with schools, community groups, SEND participants and other under-represented groups.
Running alongside this professional practice is a sustained and deeply personal body of work responding to the natural world. This includes Enchantment, a nature-inspired audiovisual work featuring her own character drawings brought to life through animation and an original rescored Tchaikovsky soundtrack, screened at BALTIC Cinema; Majestic Star, a self-funded audiovisual work integrating the physics of sound with moving image in response to the natural environment; and a significant original composition weaving whale and dolphin sounds with orchestral music.
Current work marks a new and deeply felt chapter. Nicola's encounter with marine conservation issues — and the grief, wonder and urgent questioning it provoked — led her to ask whether beauty might be as powerful a force for environmental engagement as fear; whether art that makes people fall in love with the natural world might move them as profoundly as art that confronts its destruction.
Finding the answer on her own doorstep — in the extraordinary relationship between North East coastal communities and the dolphins that swim their shores, and in the joy and love those encounters inspire — she has developed a specific artistic question that now drives everything: can animation, informed by marine science and rooted in beauty and wonder, reveal the hidden worlds of the North East marine environment in ways that inspire genuine connection and care for the natural world?
This new direction brings together animation as a newly developing artistic discipline, emerging scientific dialogue with marine researchers, and critical mentoring with Professor Uta Kögelsberger at Newcastle University, whose own practice works at the intersection of art, environmental knowledge and activism