Sue Cake lectures in Scriptwriting in the Film, Screen & New Media Discipline in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. Susan received an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship whilst undertaking her professional doctorate at QUT and in 2018 was awarded an Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award for her thesis titled Narrative Comedy Screenwriting: Facilitating self-directed, transformative learning.

The creative output from her practice-led research includes a story bible and episodes of a proposed narrative comedy television series titled Fighting Fit. Fighting Fit gives neoliberal, corporate approaches to education a good oiling up and rubbing down, parodied within the hazardous confines of a run-down fitness centre. Susan’s exegesis facilitated transformative learning which revealed how writing narrative comedy performed creative resistance against the corporatisation of education.

Susan has taught screen production in the vocational training and education sector and produced numerous interactive CD ROMS for a range of NGOs and charitable organisations as well as short films. She was the curriculum expert on a $250,000 ABC funded project aimed at increasing student media production within the South Pacific. Susan wrote an Innovative Teaching Guide aimed at supporting TVET Journalism Lecturers in project-based approaches to teaching and learning screen content production.

Susan has presented papers at conferences such as ASPERA, the national peak body for screen production research in Australia, the Australasian Humour Studies Network, and Scriptwriting Symposium. She has published in national and international Q1 and ERA A journals.