Writing is an act of translation and transformation, an embodied, material and spatial activity through which researchers’ design and shape knowledge. Thus, researchers are story-tellers with signatures beyond the page and the computer space. Currently, narrative genres of writing research are emerging as a wide and heterogeneous field of work that often interacts with visual culture such as photography, paintings, theatre and film. What are the potential possibilities of narrative life writing genres to contribute to shape creative and performative art based practice for scholars across the arts, design and science? In this keynote I explore epistemological questions about the author as creator and story-teller in art based practice and suggest that the expanding heterogeneous field of narrative life writing genres, where the written word often interacts with visual culture, is useful as a catalyst for such practices. Inspired by auto/biography- and life writing, feminist theory and literary fiction, I promote the idea of artistic self-portraiture where the writer at work perform their writing selves in specific situated locations, power relations and inter/disciplinary contexts. I will draw on my specific work with the untimely academic novella, to explore the relationship between the body, material objects and textual shaping, the ethics and politics of poetics, self and another.