Prof Dina Zoe Belluigi studies the development of criticality, agency and creativity in the thinking and the practices of academics and artists, and the ways these are impacted by wider transitions in institutions and society. She is particularly interested in the authority of those socially marginalised who produce critical thought and work.

Thus, her research and teaching includes an interest in the question of academic authorship (and authority), issues of agency, the conditions for creativity and criticality, and the politics of belonging, participation and disruption within/ at the margins/ and beyond institutional cultures and boundaries. Her work is in service of social justice and witnessing, in the hopes of contributing to addressing inequalities and oppression.

She has utilised a range of methods, and is increasingly interested in aesthetic and sensory evocations of that which is difficult to represent, express, remember or study. This includes visual and material processes and residues.

She is the Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation in Academia, at the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work (SSESW) at Queen's University Belfast; and is affiliated with collaborators and institutional hubs across the world raising questions about "the university" and its critical function. She supervises and externally examines internationally at Masters and Phd level in the transdisciplinary area of Higher Education Studies, producing research in that field, in addition to Critical University Studies and Creative Arts Higher Education. Prior to relocating to Northern Ireland, she was a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University, South Africa. She was involved in the coordination of honours and masters programmes in higher education, including those to do with philosophies and paradigms underpin and construct notions of teaching and learning, assessment of student learning, and the evaluation of teaching and courses. 

She completed her transdisciplinary doctoral studies in Higher Education Studies and Fine Art at Kingston University (London), under the supervision of Prof Emeritus Bernadette Blair and Ann Hulland. Through primary data generated within England and South Africa, she looked at the development of the artist's critical judgement through the formal curriculum, and found that the conditions for creativity were adversely impacted through summative assessment practices, which also conflicted with many of the artist-assessors' identities. She has a Masters in Education (Higher Education) which considered the relations between 'creativity' and 'criticality' in fine art studio practice. She holds a Master of Fine Art Degree, on the practices and politics of ethical commemoration in artistic practices after historical conflict and trauma, specifically post-Holocaust and post-Apartheid. Her solo exhibition for that degree, titled 'mneme', engaged with erasure within 'white' South African families during Apartheid, by working with everyday intimate artefacts (the photo album, memory objects). Her Bachelor of Fine Art (with Honours), including both her masters degrees, were read at South African universities. She has taught Fine Art Studio Practice, and Art History and Visual Culture at university, and produced much related research. She produced a solo exhibition, Unbridled, which engaged playfully with marriage by complicating the object-subject positioning of herself as artist as Lilith/ Eve figure and 'the nude' in western art. She collaborates with artists in her projects, drawing on visual methodologies and methods within her current research practice.

Her research projects and collaborations have included the contexts of England, India, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, South Africa, the UK, and those displaced from Syria and Zimbabwe, amoung others. Common concerns are the many after-effects of partition, colonialism, conflict and various socio-cultural oppressions in representation, including of 'history'. Please see her research outputs and projects for more.