Dr Daisy Asquith

Dr Daisy Asquith is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths and has convened the MA in Filmmaking (Screen Documentary) since 2015.

Daisy is a documentary filmmaker with over 20 years experience making films for the BBC, Channel 4, BFI, Irish Film Board, Grierson Trust and Sheffield Docfest among others. She has won many awards for her work including the Royal Television Society Best Documentary Series twice (‘The Decision’ and ‘15’), a Grierson, and a BAFTA nomination. Daisy has been invited to serve on juries for BAFTA, RTS, London Film Festival, Grierson and numerous international documentary film festivals. Her research blends theory and practice and she has presented at conferences internationally, including SCMS Atlanta. She was awarded her PhD in Creative & Critical Practice from the University of Sussex in 2019.

Daisy’s most recent film Queerama (BFI 2017) spent a year on a world tour of documentary and queer film festivals, often with Daisy accompanying for Q&A. Countries where the film played include Russia, Romania, Australia, Slovakia, Taiwan, South Korea, Italy, Poland, United States, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland and Spain. The Russian, Romanian and South Korean screenings were particularly important, as LGBT rights are poor, and Daisy’s presence at the screenings enabled impassioned debate and storytelling to take place. The first Queerama Storytelling Workshop, inspired by this dynamic response, took place at Goldsmiths on 6 February 2019, with 120 attendees.

Daisy’s research interests include documentary storytelling, with particular reference to new forms and hybrids, autobiographical film, queer histories, gender and class in film and television, representations of queerness and class on television, archive film and home video. She is on the board of the Centre for Queer Research at Goldsmiths and also programmes an annual series of masterclasses by visiting documentary filmmakers, Gold Docs. Her MA students have won awards for their graduation films and screened at festivals internationally, as well as securing work with leading documentary practitioners in the industry.

Publications and research outputs

Book Section

Asquith, Daisy. 2022. Queerama: Re-imagining Queer Pasts and Futures. In: Joanna Zylinska, ed. The Future of Media. London: Goldsmiths Press, pp. 177-194. ISBN 9781913380144

Asquith, Daisy. 2016. Whose Shame is it Anyway? In: Paul Booth and Lucy Bennett, eds. Seeing Fans. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781501318450

Film/Video

Asquith, Daisy and Kimmings, Bryony. 2020. Opera Mums with Bryony Kimmings.

Asquith, Daisy. 2019. Queerama: A Century of Gay Rights and Desires on Film [DVD].

Asquith, Daisy. 2017. Science on Buses.

Show/Exhibition

Asquith, Daisy. 2018. This is Not Us. In: "THIS IS NOT US", ATTENBOROUGH CENTRE FOR CREATIVE ARTS, United Kingdom, APRIL 2018.

Thesis

Asquith, Daisy. 2012. Filming the Shadows. Doctoral thesis, Brighton University & Sussex University