Assunta Ruocco is an artist, writer, and Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Lincoln. Her research and practice explore photographic archives, feminist auto-citation, and digital afterlives. She is currently leading a British Academy/Leverhulme project on preserving women artists’ social media archives, building on her long-term work Our Days of Gold and recent publications in PARSE and Journal of Drawing.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Over the past five years I have combined artistic practice, academic research, teaching, and curatorial work at the intersection of photography, archives, and feminist visual culture. My practice-based research has centred on long-term projects such as Our Days of Gold (2017–ongoing), a daily photographic archive on Instagram that has generated international presentations and publications on grief, memory, and digital afterlives.
In parallel, I have developed new theoretical frameworks around feminist auto-citation and digital archiving through the work of the late artist Alison Lloyd, supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant (2024–27) in collaboration with Rhizome. This research has led to publications in PARSE Journal, and MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture (forthcoming 2025), and to presentations at major conferences, including PARSE (2023), the International Conference on Photography and Theory (2024), Spectral Cinema (São Paulo, 2025), and Archivo’s Reframing the Archive (2025).
Alongside research and writing, I have curated and co-curated exhibitions, including Mirrors, Windows, Portals (2024), which explored feminist photographic legacies and archival practices. My teaching at the University of Lincoln has focused on Fine Art pedagogy with a strong emphasis on photographic archives, digital practices, and experimental documentation.
Overall, my work over the past five years has consistently investigated how photographic archives—analogue and digital, personal and collective—are reanimated across platforms and practices of care, generating new models of preservation, narration, and participation.
