Colleen is the Senior Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. She is the Director of the Digital Archaeology and Heritage Lab, the MSc in Digital Archaeology and the MSc in Digital Heritage. She was Marie Curie Experienced Researcher for the EUROTAST project from 2013-2015 and a postdoctoral fellow for the Centre for Digital Heritage from 2015-2017.

Colleen has an established international reputation as a leading scholar in critical digital archaeology and heritage. Her research contributions fall in three main areas: 1) bringing digital archaeology into conversation with current theory drawn from feminist, queer, posthuman, and anarchist approaches 2) multisensorial interventions and digital embodiment, with a focus on avatars of past people created from bioarchaeological data 3) issues surrounding craft, enskillment and pedagogy in analogue and digital methods in field archaeology, including photography, videography, and drawing.

Colleen is involved with several large research projects in the UK and EU. She is currently the PI on the UKRI-AHRC funded OTHER EYES project which confronts an emerging issue within archaeology: that of interpreting past people using digital technology. She is collaborating with York Museums Trust and interactive digital media specialists BetaJester and a large team of diverse researchers to create avatars based on Romano-British era human remains found in York. She is the Co-I of The Avebury Papers with Professor Mark Gillings of Bournemouth University to creatively investigate the extensive personal and archaeological archive at Avebury. She directs archaeological excavations at the Hili Archaeological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the United Arab Emirates with the Department of Culture and Tourism. Other projects include TETRARCHS, the Aide Memoire Project, Cults of the Head?, and BOCCAHD.