Building UCT’s creative work and celebrating it through the UCT Creative Works award

Dear colleagues

It is unsurprising that the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) research outputs in significant ways – with many of our researchers pivoting their work to focus on immediate global research needs. We have seen ground-breaking, creative research across the university, and I would like to express my gratitude to all of you for overcoming many obstacles to produce the quality outputs we have seen.

These include our creative outputs, a type of output that we are seeking to acknowledge and celebrate increasingly as a key part of our research. We are pleased that these are now actively recognised amongst the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) research outputs.

Unfortunately, it seems that the move to an online environment, brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, has seen a decline in the profile of UCT’s creative outputs.

The UCT Creative Works Awards Committee has reported very low submission rates over the last two years. While lockdown has certainly had a detrimental effect on traditional ways of creative expression, we’re eager to celebrate UCT researchers within this realm who pivoted to alternative platforms for their outputs.

In an effort to encourage more submissions, the committee has extended this year’s call to the end of the mid-year break on 24 July 2022. Reapplications from unsuccessful nominees over the previous two years are also invited.

About the Creative Works Award

The Creative Works Award, with a value of R30 000, and the Meritorious Creative Works Prize, with a value of R15 000, recognise major creative works by UCT staff, including art works, performances, productions, compositions and architectural designs produced over the last five years as part of the applicant’s permanent position at UCT.

You can view a list of the previous winners.

Interested staff members can access more information about the call, the nomination and the secondment process, as well as the submission steps online.

I hope many of you will consider submitting your work or nominating your colleagues’ works, or both. This is a fantastic opportunity to showcase the incredible creativity in our community.

Supporting your creative work

I would like to emphasise that the great variety of research support services offered by UCT’s Research Office, Libraries, the Research Contracts and Innovation office, ICTS and others, are available to all researchers and research support staff at UCT. The nature of your research and your outputs does not and should not exclude you from making use of these services.

Thank you to those who have submitted nominations and applications already and to our staff who are, even now, finding new and innovative ways of expressing their individual and collective creativity. We look forward to celebrating both that creative work already complete in this round of awards, as well as that in progress or currently being conceptualised in our future awards.

Warm regards

Professor Sue Harrison
Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Internationalisation

Read previous communications:

• From the UCT Executive
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