Izabela Derda is a media scholar whose research focuses on innovation in creative industries, with particular attention to how emerging technologies reshape co-creative practices and their dynamics. She approaches media as a practice embedded in networks of humans, organisations, and technologies. A central focus of her work is audience engagement, examined in the institutional contexts in which it takes shape. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in Media & Creative Industries at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she co-leads the ERMeCHS research cluster Value in Creative Economy (ViCE).
Her work engages closely with questions of human-centric digital transformation in cultural and creative sectors, with audience engagement as a key site where innovation acquires social relevance. Through international research projects and collaborations with industry and policymakers across Europe, she examines how data practices, AI-enabled tools, and digital infrastructures shape both organisational practice and the ways audiences are addressed, negotiated, and mobilised.
A defining feature of her work is its combination of methodological innovation and direct engagement with industry and policy. She is a co-lead of the Horizon Europe Innovation Action EXCENTRIC (€3.6M), which develops collaborative data ecosystems for cultural and creative sectors, enabling responsible and decentralised data sharing across organisations. In her research on audience engagement (Smartification of Audience Engagement), she combines qualitative inquiry with neuroscientific and computational methods to address persistent gaps between how engagement is defined – cognitively, emotionally, and behaviourally – and how it is measured and understood in practice. Alongside this work, she contributes to European innovation and policy agendas through advisory roles, including interim co-leadership within EIT Culture & Creativity Strategic Topic Group on AI and Digital Futures, and contributions to policy discussions on cultural innovation and AI governance.
- Across her work, she explores:
- how cultural and creative organisations innovate under institutional constraints,
- how digital innovation reshapes audience engagement – and how questions of participation, trust, and public value surface in that process,
- and how advertising operates as a creative industry shaped by enduring tensions between creativity, commerce, and collaboration.
She is the author of a book Advertising as a Creative Industry:
Regime of Paradoxes (Routledge), and brings long-standing industry experience as a multi-award-winning media producer and advertising expert (Cannes Lions, Effie), including jury service at major international festivals and advisory work for SXSW Pitch Competition.
Outside of work, she is a mother, shares her home with a golden retriever, and is a passionate runner who has completed three marathons.