Nadia Malik

Nadia Malik is the Director of the Performance Department at London College of Fashion (University of the Arts London). She has previously been the Course Leader for BA Costume Design and Making at Nottingham Trent University and BA Costume With Textiles at the University of Huddersfield, Head of Wardrobe at the University of Essex, and lectured at various other universities. Nadia is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy a committee member of the Society of British Theatre Designers and the Reviews Editor (Exhibitions and Events) for the journal Studies in Costume and Performance. She holds an MA in Costume Design for Performance from London College of Fashion and a BA in Textile Design (Nottingham Trent University). Nadia’s costume design work has encompassed new and classic writing, opera, folk and contemporary dance, musicals, experimental site-specific devised work, and live art, including international festivals. With a collaborative approach to performance devising, her work explores the human body, movement, and how costume-led design practice can engage audiences with performance. She has also curated and produced costume events.

With her doctoral studies, Nadia Malik researches the relationship between pedagogical practices in Art & Design and costume education, and how this could shape costume education, practice and ‘scholarship’ as defined by Boyer, 1990. Following a growing number of costume events and forums driving the expansion of the discipline, including the formation of Critical Costume (2013) and the founding of Studies in Costume and Performance (2016), her research focuses on Knowledge Exchange between academia and industry through experimental pedagogical practice in costume at university level. This research is situated within the wider framework of recognised art & design pedagogies such as Shreeve’s solo and co-authored writing on educator-student relationships in art & design education (2010, 2012), Meyer and Land’s ‘Threshold Concepts’ (2006), Wenger’s ‘Communities of Practice’ (1998), and Sigal’s recent work on Knowledge Exchange between in the Arts and Culture sectors and Higher Education Institutions (2023).