Susan Luckman is Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, Founding Director of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre (CP3), and the Cultural and Creative Industries Research Platform Leader of the EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of South Australia.
Susan is internationally recognised for her research into cultural trends in digital technologies and the subsequent renewal of interest in craft and the analogue they have both enabled and provoked. Working in direct dialogue with creative communities, her research informs both policy and individual practice. Her training in Cultural Studies informs an approach to knowledge generation that values the richness of human experience and recognises the importance of inclusion and diversity. Committed to making university research accessible to the wider community, alongside her scholarly outputs, Susan is the author of many substantial public reports bringing the voices of individuals into dialogue with cultural policy.
Susan has been a Chief Investigator on 7 ARC and 4 EU awarded projects totalling more than $AU4.4 million. These include two currently active ARC Discovery Projects: ‘The Value of Craft Skills to the Future of Making in Australia’ (DP190100349) which explores how the craft skills required to sustain and grow skilled Australian making can be maintained and extended, and 'Artisanal Making and the Future of Small-Scale Local Production' (DP220100110, with Associate Professor Michelle Phillipov) which aims to identify the consumer identities, decision-making and sustainable artisanal production models underpinning contemporary demand for locally made goods. Previously, she was Chief Investigator on the Discovery Project 'Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-economy’ which explored how online distribution is changing the environment for operating a creative micro-enterprise and, with it, the opportunities for mobile working lives and the impacts upon the larger relationship between public and private spheres this entails. 
Susan is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (2022-2026), an expert reviewer for the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission (REA), on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Q1), Continuum: A Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (Q1), and Australian Feminist Studies (Q2), and is Series Editor of the Creative Working Lives book series. She has been a Cheney Senior Fellow at the University of Leeds (UK), and has also held visiting posts at The Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy), and Manchester Institute for Popular Culture, Manchester Metropolitan University (UK).
Susan is the author of Craftspeople and Designer Makers in the Contemporary Creative Economy (Palgrave 2020), Craft and the Creative Economy (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Locating Cultural Work: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and Remote Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), co-editor of Craft Communities (Bloomsbury 2024), Pathways into Creative Working Lives (Palgrave 2020), The ‘New Normal’ of Working Lives: Critical Studies in Contemporary Work and Employment (Palgrave 2018), Craft Economies (Bloomsbury 2018), and Sonic Synergies: Music, Identity, Technology and Community (Ashgate 2008), and author of over 100 book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles and reports on platform economies, cultural and creative work, craft, creative industries and creative micro-entrepreneurialism.