Professor Mike Collier is a lecturer, writer, curator and artist based at the University of Sunderland. Much of his work is collaborative, working with musicians, sound artists and printmakers. His work pays close attention to the environment and is usually place-specific. Most recently, Mike has examined the nature of local soundscapes, exploring ways of showing how we might better understand our complex relationship to a more-than-human world, enabling us to value the whole world (birds, plants, animals, peoples etc) as a living ecology of cultural differences. His current work examines, visually and sonically, the way that individual birds from different species interact ‘culturally’ in the dawn chorus, and re-imagines this exploration of avian cultural diversity in vision and sound. In 2010 Mike co-founded WALK (Walking, Art, Landskip and Knowledge), a research centre at the University of Sunderland which looks at the way we creatively engage with the world as we walk through it. Mike has exhibited in the UK and abroad and his work is held in a number of public and private collections.