Russell Watson

Russell Watson is a Barbadian artist and arts educator who works mainly in digital media and theatre. He studied theatre and education in Jamaica at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts (Diplomas in Drama in Education and Theatre Arts); and digital media the USA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, MFA in Film, Video and New Media). He currently lives in Barbados, where he lectures in film at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill and is the lead artist of RSTUDIO, a multimedia workshop that offers a wide range of photo, video and graphic services to a diverse client base including corporate entities, government agencies, theatre companies, fine artists and academics.

His feature film A Hand Full of Dirt (2010) won the Audience Choice Award from the Reel World Festival (Toronto) and was nominated for Best First Feature Film Director at the Pan African Film Festival (Los Angeles).

In addition to his work in conventional media, he has also curated and exhibited in numerous gallery exhibitions in Barbados, the wider Caribbean, and internationally.

His recent work of combining drawing, photography, multimedia projection and enhanced portraiture has yielded a taxonomy of beings and landscapes that seem to exist simultaneously in cosmic, atomic, primordial and futuristic space-time. This mashing together of scale and epoch is his way of contemplating temporality and the fragility of ecosystems in the Anthropocene.