Xander Sandwell Kliszynski holds a BA and MA in Photography and is currently completing a PhD by practice exploring representations of gender and identity in visual culture. His research investigates how staged and digitally constructed photographic images can create a tension between the familiar and the strange—an effect resonant with psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas such as the uncanny, the weird, the eerie, and the absurd. His academic research and artistic practice are closely intertwined, with each informing the development of the other.