Rachel Landers, a renowned documentary filmmaker and writer with a PhD in history, is the head of Head of Media Arts & Production, Animation Production and Music and Sound Design, in the Faculty of Design and Society at UTS. Professor Landers brings her expertise from the film industry into the Creative Production disciplines at UTS. Her award-winning films have screened at numerous international festivals and been broadcast globally. 

Professor Landers was the Head of Documentary at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), a position she held between 2011 -2018. During her tenure, she was responsible for relaunching the AFTRS Documentary Department with a ground-breaking, non-fiction filmmaking curriculum for students. 

In 2011 she received the NSW Premier’s History Fellowship. In 2015, she released the ABC/DVA/Screen Australia documentary Lest We Forget What? for the centenary of World War 1. She published her first non-fiction book Who Bombed the Hilton? with New South Books in 2016 which won the national Nib award for excellence in research in the creation of a literary work. Her feature film A Dog and Her Boy is in development with support from Screen Australia, Film Victoria and Screen West. In 2023 she received a Powerhouse research fellowship for her hybrid documentary work and a major cross faculty UTS research grant as chief investigator between Animation Production, Science and Engineering to produce a series of animated hybrid documentary shorts for children featuring scientists doing cutting edge science in the microscopic world. The same year she was a keynote speaker at SXSW Sydney. In 2024 she published the monograph Hybrid Documentary and Beyond with Routledge. The cross-faculty animation/science/engineering project (FASS/FoS/FEIT) was featured at a sold out VIVID 2024 with a workshop for 100s of children called The Superheroes of Science. The project became the basis of a successful 2025-2027 Australian Research Council Discovery Project application The Wonderful, Fluorescent, Massive World of Tiny, Invisible Things: Creating Transformative Science Stories for Children, with Rachel as lead chief investigator.

In 2021 Media Arts and Production and Animation Production, UTS was accepted as a full member of CILECT (Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision) the International Association of Film and Television Schools. Membership is highly competitive and there are only 6 Australian member schools. CILECT includes over 180 audio-visual and media educational institutions from 65 countries on 6 continents with 9,000+ teachers and staff that annually train 55,000+ students and communicate with an alumni network over 1,330,000+ strong. CILECT is committed to developing and promoting the highest standards of education, research and training for film, television and related media through establishing and organising global and regional forums for the exchange of artistic, pedagogical, methodological and managerial best practices for all its members. At the November 2023 CILECT World Congress in Rome, Rachel was elected to the CILECT Asia-Pacific Association (CAPA) Council - the regional association of the CILECT member schools in the Asia-Pacific Region including Australia, China, Singapore, India, Hong Kong, Japan and Vietnam. Rachel attended the CILECT congress in Beijing China 2024 leading to several potential research and teaching exchanges. This is building on the cultural teaching exchange in which 5 MAP, Animation Production academics and Media Lab professional staff were invited to give a series of masterclasses at the Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema supported by the Vietnamese Ministry of culture.