At Lincoln Arts Centre, research is not an add-on,  it’s an embedded, generative, and collaborative part of everything we do. From inception to public engagement, we see research as a shared endeavour between artists, academics, and communities.

We champion interdisciplinary, practice-led and public-facing research that is rooted in both critical inquiry and creative experimentation. Whether through new commissions, residencies, or post-show discussions, we treat performance and visual arts not only as outputs, but also as methods of discovery that can support an academic in their research enquiry.

Our approach pairs industry-leading artists and performance-makers with academic expertise across disciplines, from design and computing to health, social sciences and the humanities, to explore, co-create, and respond to urgent questions of our time. A recent example, Inside Odds On, exemplifies this in action: blending live performance with gaming, the project draws on academic research into gambling, behavioural psychology, and storytelling to create new cultural insight.

We are proud to work extensively with communities both locally and globally, and to create space for archival, ethnographic, and critical research methods. Our work finds form in performances, exhibitions, participatory events, and discursive platforms that invite dialogue, not just dissemination.

We support research at all stages: from early conversations and exploratory prototyping through to funded commissions and dissemination. To support this, we offer:

• Template budgets for events, conferences and commissioning models

• Examples of previous interdisciplinary research projects

• Embedded wraparound activity to connect public audiences with research ideas

• A culture of co-creation, reflection, and openness with clear timelines, artistic policies, and ideas and a strategic mindset.

We actively invite researchers to collaborate with us, not just to showcase findings, but to help us shape the questions themselves. If you’re looking to explore new ways of working across disciplines and with the public, we’d love to talk.