Pernilla Manjula Philip starts Professional Doctorate

Pernilla’s trajectory is part of the national Professional Doctorate pilot for Universities of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. At the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, it also marks a continuation of experimentation with third-cycle artistic research that was established through the Creator Doctus (CrD).*

Pernilla's research proposal, Creating Care: A practice of collective access and learning, looks at how Crip knowledge and disability justice can change the way institutions approach care, learning and design. Centering accessibility, interdependence, and lived experience, her practice explores illness in relation to the medical industry, approaching it as both lived reality and site of inquiry.

Rooted in personal experience, her research investigates how do-it-yourself/together (DIY/DIT) and open-source medical tools surface questions of vulnerability, shared resilience, and power. She highlights how unofficial practices challenge dominant medical narratives while raising questions about who shapes medical knowledge and what counts as safety. Pernilla is a member of Hackers & Designers and is a founding member of Crip the Curriculum. 

Pernilla was selected internally as a candidate by a multidisciplinary committee following a three-phase application process initiated with an open call in February 2025. Throughout the first half of 2026, she successfully submitted her research proposal to the Graduate Committee Arts + Creative of the Professional Doctorate pilot, the body tasked with overseeing the selection process, assessment and academic standards of the programme. Following this, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Rietveld Sandberg Research submitted a successful grant application to Taskforce for Applied Research SIA. The grant, made available specifically for PD trajectories, will cover salary costs for the candidate as well as a material and travel budget. Pernilla will be guided by a supervisory team consisting of Anja Groten and Florian Cramer (academic supervisors) and Linda Bonga Bouna and Constantina Zavitsanos (professional supervisors). Hackers & Designers is involved in the research project as the professional work-field partner. 

The development of the Creator Doctus at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie has contributed to a longer-term exploration of what third-cycle education can mean within art and design. Central to this has been an understanding of artistic practice not simply as an object of research, but as a way of producing and sharing knowledge in its own right. The two previous CrD trajectories completed by Yael Davids (2020) and Femke Herregraven (2024) created space to test forms of supervision, assessment, public presentation and reflection appropriate to practice-based artistic research. With Pernilla’s Professional Doctorate trajectory, this work enters a new phase. Rather than continuing a separate CrD trajectory alongside the PD, the experience and approaches developed through the CrD will now inform the implementation of the PD at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. This offers a highly valued contribution to the national pilot, which includes nearly all Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences. At the same time, participation in the national PD pilot places this work within a broader framework in which approaches to third-cycle professional education are being developed collectively across Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences.