International Research Centre for Interactive Storytelling

Welcome to IRIS

The International Research Centre for Interactive Storytelling (IRIS) promotes and supports creative research into the use and application of storytelling in media and technology. It has been formed to explore new, alternative and emerging methods of storytelling in an interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival context. 

The research centre brings together an interdisciplinary network of researchers, practitioners, industry partners and students in order to ​foster creative conversations around ground-breaking research in contemporary media forms. Furthermore, it aims to promote dialogue between creative practice and theoretical knowledge as related forms of research work and provides the conditions for fully developing a wide range of possible projects. 

The centre offers research seminars, workshops and conferences. It also welcomes PhD candidates in its members’ areas of research, including film studies, documentary studies, audience analysis, visual ethnography, digital education, visual communication and journalism.

Some of our current core enquires are:

• the impact of “the Digital” in real world contexts.
• new forms in immersive and interactive narrative media
• design, creation and distribution of story events (in transmedia and social media)

Our research

View the work of some of our IRIS researchers.

Video: How we tell stories, an interactive workshop

Since the research centre's formation, IRIS has developed a number of projects with our members, who come from a variety of disciplines within Leeds Trinity. Our PhD candidates for the most part work on practice-based research projects, which means that as the main output of their research, they create a practical output such as a film, a documentary or an exhibition.

IRIS also works continuously with other institutions and with industry at a national and international level.

In this video, Dr Stefano Odorico and Ilaria Vecchi discuss creating a platform for practice-based research in creative media and documentary storytelling. This is a field where academia interacts with the media industry and with companies that are developing cutting-edge technologies in order to enable us to tell stories in different and often unconventional ways.

Our members

Click on each IRIS member's name to visit their profile on our Research Portal.

Directors and contact

• Director: Dr. Stefano Odorico, email: s.odorico@leedstrinity.ac.uk
• Co-director: Prof. Graham Roberts
• Deputy Director: Carolyn Jackson-Brown, email: C.Jackson-Brown@leedstrinity.ac.uk
• Deputy Director: Kostas Maronitis, email: k.maronitis@leedstrinity.ac.uk