Email: awalker8@icloud.com
www.anna-walker-research.com
https://are-research.com/

Brief Bio:  Anna Walker, PhD, is a writer, storyteller, multidisciplinary artist and psychotherapist who explores the traces of trauma on both the body and the earth, investigating spaces of separation and connection across generations. In her practice, she examines how ancestral and intergenerational trauma moves through families and communities, and how we can create pathways for healing and reconnection.

She has published over 30 essays and book chapters, edited over 5 books of artist’s essays and research, and self-published many of her own works. Through text, photography, sound, and moving imagery, she examines resilience—how the body responds to overwhelming trauma and stress, and how it reorganises itself to navigate the complexities of such experiences across time and lineage.

She has an MA in Fine Art from Southampton University, (1998), and a certificate in Psychotherapy from CBPC, Cambridge, (2010). Her work as a psychotherapist deepened her interest in the effects of trauma on the body, leading to a PhD in Arts and Media from Plymouth University, which she completed in May 2017. Since then, she has been weaving photography, sound, and video with the text and the spoken word, using storytelling as both a research tool and a holding space to examine memory, identity, and the possibility of reimagining our relationship to ancestral patterns.

PhD Thesis research: In and out of memory: exploring the tension between remembering and forgetting when recalling 9/11, a traumatic event, is an unravelling of a traumatic memory to describe, understand and answer questions about the ‘trauma body.’ In my research, I put forward the idea that traumatic memories are detached memories with an emotional resonance that fixes them historically in a specific place and time, unwieldy anchors for a body that is neither here (present), nor there (in the past). I analyse this paradox from philosophical and psychoanalytical perspectives. Through a layered arts practice of text, sonic art work, and moving and still imagery I examine the tension where trauma meets memory, whether in an attempt to forget, or an effort to remember. Memory in this context is perceived as crucial towards understanding oneself socially, culturally and personally, whilst trauma is understood as an experience borne by the act of ‘leaving,’ wherein the mind’s coping mechanism overwhelmed by shocking external events fractures or splits. Six Fragments, (Moving Imagery and sound, 32.58 minutes, 2014-2016) and Remembering, (Moving Imagery and sound, 18.53 minutes, 2015-2017) were submitted as part of this thesis.

Recent Publications: Walker, A., ‘When things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold.’ (2025) Trans-States: Art of Revelation, Monad: Journal of Transformative Practice. https://monadjournal.com/category/volume-1-1/

Walker, A., “Negotiating Belonging through walking and listening.” (2023-2024). Published May 2025. https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/are-journal-art-research-ecology-1/anna-walker/9781068743849

Walker, A., & Milne, J., (2024/2025) “Touching Skin: A phenomenological discussion of two projects, by artists Anna Walker and Jo Milne, focusing on the skin of the body as the skin of the world.” Essay, Passepartout on Hud/Skin, Denmark, 2025.

Walker, A., “Revisiting Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographs to reimagine the noise of hysteria, the Salpêtrière Hospital, and Paris in the latter part of the nineteenth century.” Essay, Transtech Reader, Plymouth, (2024/2025).

Walker, A., (2024) “Macha, Ireland.” Story published in Herba Mythica: Myths and Folk Tales of Sacred Healing Plants, 2024.

Walker, A., & Milne, J., (2023) Unravelling Haptic Visuality, and Notions of Care Through Two Videos About Death. Research in Arts Education. Vol. 2023 No. 2.

Walker, A., (2023) “Macha’s Body in Pain,” pp. 101-124: Written on The Body, Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) Ed. Marta-Laura Cenedese.

Recent Exhibitions: Invocation: the shape of things. (2025), Group Exhibition: The Blue Lotus Foundation, London, NW3. Curated by Anna Walker, with artwork by- Jo Milne, Carol Laidler, Genie Poretzky-Lee, and Anna Walker.

“In and Out of Time,” a week of workshops, and performances, Le Locle, Switzerland, November 2024 www.merfolkstorytelling.com/in-and-out-of-time.

Storytelling, Walker+ Blythe, No Bounds Radio. May 2024. https://bit.ly/43tu78g,

‘We are the granddaughters of those who didn’t burn.’ Video. Malta Centre for the Arts, TTT.  September 2023. Link: https://vimeo.com/589741306

‘The Dreamer Awakes,’ (2023) radio edit. Broadcast March 8^th, 2023. https://www.thedreamerawakes.com/

‘Becoming Bird, I: Spring.’ Video and presentation, Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, January 2023. https://vimeo.com/703420435/

‘Match-Making’—a digital dialogue in collaboration with Siobhan O’Neil, Pepa Ivanova, and Carol Laidler. Online exhibition/performance, et al., December 2022. https://vimeo.com/777777257