Suzanna Hurst

I am a front-end web developer with intermediate skills in HTML & CSS, Javascript & React.

In 2020 I completed a full stack web development course with The Jump where I learnt to develop & deploy full-stack web applications & websites. Through this 38 week course I expanded front-end skills (HTML, CSS & Javascript including React) and learnt new skills in server-side and back-end web development. I felt creatively invigorated and could start to see how competency in coding could open up new avenues for live experiences.

In same year I created a piece of software as part of a creative process with Figs in Wigs - Astrology Bingo. First written in vanilla Javascript and subsequently in React, it uses an API to create and print birth charts and run a bingo game. Which translates to, a room of 100 people all playing bingo live, using their own personal astrological birth charts as bingo cards! AB is now on a UK tour (inc Shoreditch Town Hall, Norfolk & Norwich Fest & Colchester Arts).

As a creative programmer I regularly work with companies that use digital elements to facilitate live experiences. In 2021 I worked with NPO Coney to create Afterlife, a piece co-created with Headlong & National Theatre, inviting participants to decide which memory they’d choose to spend their eternity within. In 2021 I worked with NPO Blast Theory as a Junior React Programmer, working with their Software Lead to re-write location-based audio experience, Fixing Point.

Recent collaborations with artists include Krishna Istha’s First Trimester, creating a question randomiser to power Krishna’s interviews with prospective sperm donors, and Rachael Clerke’s Art Business, pulling in live data updates to a website to allow Rachael to expose the business behind being an artist.

I am one core artistic team of all-female performance collective Figs in Wigs. My role spans performance, co-direction & producing, as well as leading on sound design and digital elements (web development, graphic design, video editing). Most shows by Figs in Wigs include at least one strange sound piece and weird video that I have created. I also often design print for Figs’ shows and club nights and over the years have built a bizarre oeuvre of clunky, naff, visually arresting designs that have fed into the Figs in Wigs aesthetic.