Vanessa Marr is Principal Lecturer and Course Leader for BA Design for Digital Media, based at the University of Brighton's City campus. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. Her leadership responsibilities include roles as the Academic Lead for Learning & Teaching and the Academic Lead for Research Mentoring in the School of Art and Media. She sits on the school ATHENA SWAN Equality and Diversity Committee, the School Quality and Standards Committee (SQSC) and is Deputy Chair for School Education and Student Experience Committee (SESEC). She has also been an active member of the school Ethics Panel and was previously Academic Lead for Employability. 

With a professional background in graphic design, she has extensive industry experience within both marketing and publishing environments, creating and directing work for both print and moving image. She worked as an Art Editor for Dorling Kindersley and also ran her own design agency for over 10 years.

Her academic work is practice-based, creative and autoethnographic. Vanessa takes a critical view of the language of common-place domestic objects and popular narratives, in particular fairy tales, which she explores through embroidery, creative writing and drawing. Her research is underpinned by visual design-theory and process whilst embracing an intuitive and practice-based approach that facilitates self-authorship and her continuing exploration of narrative and sequence.

In 2015 Vanessa founded and continue to lead the award-winning Domestic Dusters collaborative research project, which invites women to embroider their domestic experiences upon a duster. It is regularly exhibited, transforming the duster from a cloth kept under the sink into a powerful collection of voices. The growing collection includes almost 1000 individual contributions, received from across the world. It has been exhibited in galleries such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft, at universities including Loughborough, Bedford, Brighton, and St Andrews, and in libraries and other public community spaces. It has also been presented exhibited and internationally, in both Europe and the US. As part of this project, Vanessa has also received Impact Acceleration Account funding to collaborate with community partners and empower whose domestic situations are compromised. This has included inviting unpaid carers to embroider their caring experiences onto duster, which were displayed and presented to politicians at the Senedd in 2023, calling for improved rights. 

Vanessa publishes widely on feminist concerns including invisible domestic and caring labour, the relationship between motherhood and academia, creative research methods, and the role of stitching as a socially engaged, craftivist practice. She is also completing a PhD with the University of Brighton entitled: Enticing and enacting visual domestic narratives by drawing with thread upon a duster: An autoethnographic study.