Our Team
Professor Nick Henry
Centre Director
Nick Henry is Professor of Economic Geography and, in 2023, became the founding Executive Director of the Centre for Creative Economies. He returned to academe with Coventry University in 2013 and was subsequently promoted to Co-Director of the new Centre for Business in Society and a Professorship. Previously he had been Consulting Director, Economic Development and Economic Policy at international policy and evaluation house ICF GHK and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), Newcastle University. From 2019 – 2023 he led Coventry University’s contribution to Evaluating Coventry UK City of Culture 2021. Nick is a Director of the social enterprise, Creative United, and Editor-in-Chief of European Urban and Regional Studies: Sage Journals.
Dr Victoria Barker
Research Fellow
Victoria Barker is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Creative Economies and a British Academy Innovation Fellow (2024-25). Her research explores the business approaches and value systems of creative freelancers and cultural policy. Her British Academy Fellowship works with the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub to explore local policy engagement, creative ecosystems and networks of value. Victoria previously worked as a programme manager in further education policy, and as an arts and culture evaluation consultant. She has additional experience in research impact and public engagement and is a stakeholder of community interest company Designing Dialogue.
Professor David Bek
Theme Lead
David Bek leads the research theme on Creative Economies and Ecological Sustainability and is PGR lead within the Centre for Creative Economies. He joined Coventry University’s Centre for Business in Society (CBiS) in 2015 where he co-led the Sustainable Production and Consumption Cluster and was promoted to a Professorship in 2023. Previously David was employed as a researcher at Cambridge, Newcastle and Durham Universities where he developed his interests in ethical trade, agri-commodity value chains and environmental sustainability through projects such as the Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Ethical production in South Africa: Advancing a cultural economy approach’. David is co-lead of the internationally influential Sustainable Cut-flowers Project which focuses upon the diverse cultures and geographies of flower production and consumption with a view to promoting more socially and ecologically sustainable practices.
Professor Eleonora Belfiore
Theme lead
Professor Belfiore leads the research theme on Space, Place, and the Creative Economy. She has published extensively on cultural politics and policy, cultural value, and particularly the place that notions of the ‘social impacts’ of the arts have had in British cultural policy discourses. Ele’s most recent work has researched the labour conditions of socially engaged arts practice from an ethics of care perspective, and the role of the creative industries for development in Ghana. Ele is committed to the promotion of equality, diversity and inclusion in Higher Education, and she is one of the founding members of the Women In Academia Support Network. For Palgrave, she edits the book series New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, which has published 21 volumes to date, and she is Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Cultural Trends.
Dr Ben Kyneswood
Theme Lead
Ben Kyneswood is Associate Professor of Digital Heritage and Culture, and Director of Coventry Digital; a participatory city archive engaging local knowledge with institutional archives. With a research specialism in community voice and photographic archives, his first major project was on the ESRC-funded Imagine which explored historic regeneration in Hillfields, Coventry, using co-production and visual research to challenge stigmatisation and inform policy debates. He has been funded by the British Library (2018-2022) and UCLA (2024-26) to digitise and investigate the Hamilton Photographic Archive in Bombay, India, and by AHRC to support Scarborough Museums to develop their digital offer.
Professor Louise Moody
Theme Lead
Louise Moody's research is focused on the design, development and evaluation of products, interventions and services to benefit health and wellbeing. In addition to her role as Director of the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities, she also leads on the Creative Economies for Health and Wellbeing research theme.
Our Postgraduates
Andrea Cop
Andrea’s PhD project is investigating the role and development of research in the UK cultural heritage sector, especially museums. In doing so, her research considers the role of policy and governance structures in the sector, what is understood by research and practice research and its purpose to individual organisations. Findings will support consideration of research in the context of cultural heritage planning, resilience and sustainability.
Andrea has an undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of Aberdeen, and a Masters in European Policy, Law and Management, in which her research concentrated on research and development policy in the least developed countries, and skills development and innovation practice in SMEs respectively. Andrea is a research management professional in a museum, specialising in building mutually beneficial partnerships.
Julyan Levy
Julyan’s PhD is an ethnographic investigation into the spaces where Diverse and Solidarity Economies emerge in the UK and EU. His aim is to discover what cultural practices contribute to place-based development in these spaces and whether they offer tangible alternatives to the dominant economic system.
Julyan has an undergraduate degree in anthropology with sustainability from University of Exeter. His UG dissertation on low impact intentional communities was published in a Routledge environmental volume. He also gained his Masters in critical human geographies from Exeter investigating the human-cannabis relationship.
