Vicki Thornton is the Course Leader and a Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Photojournalism and Documentary Photography course at London College of Communication. As a visual artist and filmmaker working between the cinema and the gallery, she combines documentary and fiction filmmaking approaches to examine relationships between site, collective memory, performance, and identity. She received her MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2011 and completed her PhD in Film Practice at Queen Mary University of London in 2024. Her doctoral research, supported by Creative Europe (MEDIA), the British Council in Ukraine, and House of Europe, examines the decolonisation of Ukraine’s politics of memory and identity between 2014 and 2022 through documentary film and artists’ moving image projects produced during and after the Maidan Revolution.
Vicki worked extensively in Ukraine between 2016-2022: directing and producing documentary film projects in Donbas, Kyiv and Lviv (2018-2021); co-directing the interdisciplinary musical film performance, Antratsyt: Perseverance Day at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre, Kyiv (2021); exhibiting at Yermilov Centre, Kharkiv (2018); developing work as artist-in-residence at IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiatives, Kyiv as part of the British Council and the Liverpool Biennial’s SWAP UK/Ukraine artists’ residency scheme (2017-2018); and participating in the British Council Ukraine, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival’s DocWorks UA: UK documentary development programme (2016-2017).
Vicki’s work has been shown in gallery exhibitions, film festivals and documentary film markets worldwide, including Go Short International Short Film Festival, Netherlands; PhotoIreland Festival, Dublin; When East Meets West, Trieste; Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Czech Republic; Sheffield Doc/Fest, UK and Docudays UA, Kyiv, Ukraine; PÖFF Black Nights, Tallinn, Estonia; DOKLeipzig, Germany; Cambridge Film Festival, UK; Alchemy Moving Image Festival, Scotland; Clermont-Ferrand, France; and Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York.
View the BA (Hons) Photojournalism and Documentary Photography course page.