Dr KJ Hepworth (they/them) is a highly experienced visualisation designer and scholar. They are a leading expert in ethical visualisation with expertise in critical data studies, data sovereignty, and disability justice. Their strengths are in cross-disciplinary collaboration, community engagement, and communicating complex ideas accessibly. They are a Senior Research Fellow in UniSA Creative, and a member of the Australian Research Centre Interactive Centre for Virtual Environments (IVE).
Broadly, Dr Hepworth's work shows how power weaves between data, knowledge traditions, technology, and visual cultures. Known for public speaking and zines, their expansive academic and creative production spans graphic recording, illustration, information design, installations, poetry, and augmentative communication tools.
Structurally, Dr Hepworth's work opens up relational, somatic, and tactile experiences that transmute the tension between inherited creative and destructive experiences of power. Disability, gender, hearing and sexuality marginalisations inform how their work centres access, engagement, and reciprocity. Central themes in their work are co-creating emancipatory visions of the future, and designing accessible tools to step toward them.
In practise, Dr Hepworth's extensive collaborations identify harms and risks to people from data and systems, and propose beneficial alternatives. Previous partnerships include working with climatologists, physicists, and statisticians to design ethical big data processes; agricultural scientists and geographers to ethically visualise the science of developing drought tolerant crops; and with computer scientists and digital humanists to develop ways to reduce harm in visualisations of treacherous, sensitive historical data.