Dr Natasha Adamou is an art historian specialising in contemporary art, covering sculpture, intimacy and the public space; art and the postindustrial city; and exhibition histories. Natasha is Senior Lecturer and Stage Leader at the BA Culture, Criticism and Curation, Central Saint Martins, UAL. Prior to this post, Natasha was the Henry Moore Foundation–British School at Rome Fellow in Sculpture (2015-16) and Early Career Research Fellow at the Kingston School of Art, London (2015-18). She has published essays on the work of Gabriel Orozco in the Sculpture Journal (Liverpool University Press), and in Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America (I.B.Tauris). Natasha is currently working on a book on reconstructing exhibitions from the past that will result in the publication of an edited volume with Routledge (2021).
Maria Iñigo Clavo is a researcher, curator and lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia. Her research interests are coloniality, curatorship, museology, modernity and its inventions of otherness, untranslatability and art in Latin America. Co-founder of the independent research group Peninsula in collaboration with Reina Sofía Museum. She has been a visiting fellow and Associate Lecturer at the Afterall (2015/2017), Postdoctoral Fellow for the AHRC project Meeting Margins (University of Essex), and University of São Paulo (2013-2016). She has written for publications such as e-flux, Third Text, Afterall, Stedelijk Journal, Museum of Art of São Paulo, Fran Hals Museum/De Hallen Haarlem, Valiz, L’international or Reina Sofía Museum. She has been the editor of issue # 7 (2017) of the journal Re-visiones entitled: Is it possible to decolonize? and volume 19 of journal Art in Translation, University of Edinburgh (Taylor & Francis/Routledge).
Geoff Cox, PhD, is Professor of Art and Computational Culture in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank University, co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, and also Adjunct at Aarhus University in Denmark. With Jacob Lund, he is series editor for The Contemporary Condition books published by Sternberg Press and, with Joasia Krysa, series editor for DATA browser books published by Open Humanities Press. He has a research interest in software studies, network culture, contemporary aesthetics and image politics, expressed in numerous publications and collaborative projects.
Michaela Crimmin is an independent curator specialising in investigating contemporary art in response to international conflict. A lecturer at Central Saint Martins, and co-director of Culture+Conflict (currently on hold), a not for profit agency profiling and supporting artists whose work investigates issues relating to the trauma of war. Until 2021 she taught on the RCA’s Curating Contemporary Art MA for over 15 years, and represented the RCA on a major transnational 4-year EU-funded research programme, completed in 2021, into the role of culture and the arts in contributing towards building a more cohesive and open society. Previously Head of Arts at the Royal Society of Arts, including initiating and directing the Arts & Ecology Centre; and coordinating the first works of art on the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square.
Dr. Andrew Dewdney is a research professor at London South Bank University whose current research is focused upon the intersections of art, media and technology. He is currently co-authoring a book upon how the discourses of art, media and technology play out in the contemporary art museum. From 2007 until 2010 he was the principal investigator of a major national AHRC funded project in collaboration with Tate Britain entitled Tate Encounters: Britshness and Visual Cultures. In 2014 he collaborated with Tate and The Royal College of Art on an AHRC funded research project looking at Cultural Value and the Digital in the Museum. He is an advisory board member for the peer-reviewed journals Photographies and Philosophy of Photography. He is a member of the board of trustees of Culture24. He has written, presented and published widely within media and communications and museology.
Vassilios Doupas is a curator and writer. Until recently, he was Curator of Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society in London. During his tenure, he organised a series of high-profile events including the 2019 Frieze Curatorial Summit (with Frieze Art Fair), a conference on public art (with the British Art Network and Tate Modern), a series of study days on the digital (with The Serpentine Galleries). At the CAS, he was also in charge of the programme for individual patrons that support the organisation. Previously, Vassilios was Head of Fundraising at the Athens Biennial. He has held senior positions at contemporary galleries in the UK, Greece and Turkey and his writing has appeared in Art Monthly, Flash Art and The Art Newspaper (Greece). Drawing on his market and curatorial knowledge, he advises on art acquisitions and works with seasoned and young collectors to shape and refine collections.
Rachel Falconer is a curator, researcher, and educator operating at the critical intersections of contemporary art practice, feminist technoscience, emergent technologies, civic data infrastructures and networked culture. Drawing on her sustained interest in networked art practice and expanded curatorial strategies to inform her systems-based practice, Rachel has conceived multi-scale interdisciplinary public programming, alternative exhibition models and innovative public research platforms spanning a diversity of critical modes of engagement with technology. She is Head of the Digital Arts Computing Program and Lecturer in Computational Art at Goldsmiths, University London, and PhD Researcher in collaboration with CSNI/LSBU and Whitechapel Gallery.
Dr Althea Greenan is Curator Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths University of London working extensively with the Women’s Art Library (WAL) collection. She facilitates new projects and original research with artists, students and academics exploring the WAL and positioning the collection in contemporary practices. Greenan has written on the work of women artists since the 1980s and her doctoral research on the WAL’s collection of 35mm slides features in the anthology Of Other Spaces (edited by Sophia Hao, Sternberg Press 2019), in a special issue of the journal Women: a cultural review (edited by Dr Victoria Horne, Taylor and Francis 2019) and in the exhibition Dark Energy: feminist organizing, working collectively (xhibit, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna March 2019). She has written on the Women’s Art Library for Feminism and Museums, volume 1 (edited by Dr Jenna C Ashton, MuseumsETC 2017) and elsewhere including the magazine Orlando 02 (edited by Philomena Epps 2017). She has recently contributed to Salon For A Speculative Future (edited by Monika Oechsler, with Sharon Kivland 2019) and Anonymous Was A Woman (edited by Jenna C. Ashton 2020). Her article looking at the politics of experimental photo-chemical filmwork “The Trajectory of Miriam Sampaio” appeared in The Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) Volume 9, Number 1, 1 April 2020, pp. 64-74(11) and her reflections on the archive work of Rita Keegan will appear in Mirror Reflecting Darkly: The Rita Keegan Archive (Goldsmiths Press/MIT Press edited by Rita Keegan, Matthew Harle, and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski 2021).
Myvillages was founded by artists Kathrin Böhm (UK/DE), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (DE) in 2003 to advocate for a new understanding of the rural as a place of and for cultural production. They work with formats that are close to the everyday – a communal lunch, a slide show in the village hall, a walk across the fields, a market stall. Myvillages sets up ongoing trans-local infrastructures to make connections between people and places, such as the International Village Shop and the Rural School of Economics. The session will be run by Wapke Feenstra who lives and works in Rotterdam. Her recent commissions include the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Times Museum in Guangzhou, OK_Video in Jakarta, Whitechapel Gallery in London and Potato Growers at the Istanbul Biennale 2019. Together with Böhm, Feenstra has edited The Rural (2019) as part of the Documents on Contemporary Art series by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. In 2021, Feenstra published the book Boerenzij/The Rural Side, a text and visual essay on rural migration and gentrification in her hometown Rotterdam.
Ann Gallagher is an independent curator and writer. From 2006-2019 she was Director of Collections, British Art at Tate, London, when she led the team of curators responsible for building and researching Tate’s collection of British art, and was closely involved in growing the collection of Latin American art. Exhibitions she has curated include Rachel Whiteread (2017) and Susan Hiller (2011) at Tate Britain, Damien Hirst (2012) and Helio Oiticica (2007) at Tate Modern, Biennale exhibitions Mark Wallinger (2001) and Rachel Whiteread (1997) at the British Pavilion, Venice, and numerous international group exhibitions, including on the genres of Landscape and Still Life. Since 2008 she has been a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery. Recent publications include Rose Wylie, Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, and Zarina Bhimji: Lead White, Heni Publishing. She is currently working on the catalogue raisonne of sculpture by Rachel Whiteread.
Tanya Harrod is the author of the prize-winning book The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Yale UP, 1999). She contributes regularly to The Burlington Magazine, The Guardian, Crafts, Prospect and The Literary Review. She is on the Advisory Panel of The Burlington Magazine and was Advisor to the Craft Lives Project based at the National Sound Archive of the British Library. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, of the London-based Critic’s Circle and of the Art Workers Guild. In 1999, she was given a Ceramics Arts Foundation Award for distinguished service to the Ceramic Arts. With Glenn Adamson and Edward S. Cooke she is the co-founder of The Journal of Modern Craft. The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, modern pots, colonialism and the counterculture (Yale UP, 2012) won the 2012 James Tait Black Prize for biography. Her most recent books are The Real Thing: essays on making in the modern world (Hyphen Press, 2015), Leonard Rosoman (RA, 2016), Craft, Whitechapel Gallery 2018 (part of the series Documents of Contemporary Art).
Joseph Jones, MA RCA, is an art historian based in Sussex. His research focuses on 20th and 21st-century visual art, with a particular focus on modernism, exhibitions and cultural infrastructures. He is currently programme leader in Art and Contemporary Craft at West Dean College (- 2018), having held similar positions at the University of Brighton and the University of the Arts London. His work often involves collaboration with museums, galleries and archives, and he has contributed to lecture programmes, commissions and exhibitions at the White Cube, Stedelijk Museum, Cal Arts and the Frieze Foundation. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2018), the European Cultural Foundation (2014), Erasmus Mundus (2008) and the Fulbright Commission (2006).
Naomi Korn is one of UK’s leading experts in copyright, data protection and licensing supporting artists and cultural heritage organisations. She is the founder and Managing Director of Naomi Korn Associates and a visiting lecturer at University College London, the Kingston University Business School and City University. She is a CREATe Industry Fellow and an advisor on the National Lottery Heritage Fund Advisors Network. Together with Charles Oppenheim and Adrienne Muir, Naomi co-authored Information Law: Compliance for Librarians, Information Professionals and Knowledge Managers, published in 2020. In November 2020, Naomi was awarded the prestigious CILIP KM&I Walford Award for her outstanding contribution to Knowledge and Information Management.
Dr. Elena Marchevska joined LSBU in 2012, where she is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the School of Arts and Creative Industries, and the School’s Director of Postgraduate Research. She is predominantly interested in the relationship between performance, politics of migration and environmental humanities. Her approach to teaching, research and work prioritises an ethos that is collaborative and feminist in nature.
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Dr. Richard Martin joined Whitechapel Gallery in April 2021 as The Daskalopoulos Director of Education and Public Programmes. He was previously Curator, Public Programmes at Tate, where he developed over 150 public events at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, and where he was the lead curator of the annual Tate Intensive programme for international culture professionals. His curatorial practice is supported by over 12 years’ experience teaching at King’s College London, Middlesex University and Birkbeck, University of London. Since 2016, he has been a tutor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture. Richard regularly writes on art, film and architecture, and is the author of The Architecture of David Lynch (Bloomsbury, 2014). He completed his PhD in Cultural Studies at the London Consortium, a multi-disciplinary programme partnering Birkbeck with the Architectural Association, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum and Tate.
Renee Odjidja is a curator and an educator. Her interests are decolonized and alternative models of art education, collaboration and social practice. She was previously Curator: Youth Programmes at Whitechapel Gallery (2016-2021) where she developed a multidisciplinary programme of artist commissions and exhibitions, collaborative projects, workshops, events and professional opportunities with/for young people aged 15 to 24. Recent exhibitions and projects include A Glittering City: Ayo Akingbade with Duchamp & Sons; Virtual Studio Visits; Home: Live>In Room; Digital Curating Course (2020-21). She received an Engage Marsh Award for Excellence in Gallery Education in 2019. Renee has lectured and facilitated workshops with the University of the Arts London, Goldsmiths and London Met. She led Whitechapel Gallery’s courses on How to Curate a Youth Programme (2017 &18) and How to Curate with Communities (2019) in partnership with MIMA. She holds advisory roles focusing on diversity and new artistic production at the Freelands Foundation and Genesis Foundation. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.
Dr. Nuno Faleiro Rodrigues is an art theorist based in the UK and Portugal. In 2009 he completed a PhD at the Centre for the Study of Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, on theories of the avant-garde in relation to concepts of time. Since then, he has been working on the relationship between art and politics through the study of contemporary art practices, from the 60s to today. He is a Research Fellow of Arnaldo Araújo Research Centre and one of the founding members of its Research Group in Art and Critical Studies. Currently, he is Deputy Director of the Art School of Porto (ESAP).
Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz is a curator and writer. Her exhibitions at Wellcome Collection include This is a Voice (2016), Bedlam (co-curated with Mike Jay, 2016), Ayurvedic Man (2018), Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery: Misbehaving Bodies (co-curated with George Vasey, 2019 –20) and Un encuentro vegetal / Rooted Beings. From September 2021, she will take on the position of Director of Exhibitions and the Collection at Centro Botín, Santander.
Bárbara is Guest Editor of the anthology Documents of Contemporary Art: HEALTH (co-published by The MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, 2020). She has written for Afterall, Art Agenda, Concreta, 13th Gwangju Biennale, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, MARG and Mousse Publishing. She holds a Master in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London and has lectured at Goldsmiths, Central Saint Martins and London College of Communication, amongst others.
Alice-Anne Psaltis is a researcher and educator interested in the intersection of art, politics, and place. She studied art history at the University of Queensland, Australia and an MA Art and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. Alice-Anne has worked in education and public programmes at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Royal College of Art, and Whitechapel Gallery, where she was the Programme Coordinator (2022-24) of the MA Curating Art and Public Programmes with London South Bank University.
Jane Scarth is Curator: Public Programmes at Whitechapel Gallery, responsible for public events including talks, symposiums and performance, the Writer in Residence programme and the Hear, Now podcast series. She has led on projects such as the current Ways of Knowing programme, the multi-year research strand The Rural (2017-2019) and annual Nocturnal Creatures festival (2018; 2019), as well as exhibitions with artists including Sophia Al-Maria, Rachel Pimm and Myvillages. Previously she held the role of Residency and Programmes Manager at Delfina Foundation, where she was responsible for London-based residencies and public programming with international emerging to mid-career artists.
Sunil Shah is an artist and writer. He is a PhD candidate at Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL) researching art and exhibition histories with a particular focus on Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta11 (2002). His work centres on the visual document, photography and the archives with an interest in analysing their role in relation to postcolonial theory, political science and black studies. He is Associate Lecturer at UAL on BA Photography, MA Photography and MA Photojournalism and Documentary Practice at London College of Communication and Associate Lecturer on BA Photography at University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Since 2015, he has been Associate Editor of American Suburb X online visual culture platform and has made contributions to FOAM Magazine, Source Magazine, The Eyes Magazine and FOMU Extra.
Laura Smith is the Director of Collection and Exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield and previously curator at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Most recently at Whitechapel she curated ‘Action, Gesture, Paint: women artists and global abstraction 1940–70’ (2023), ‘Emma Talbot: The Age’ (2022) and ‘Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy’ (2021), and has previously produced exhibitions with Sol Calero, Helen Cammock, Simone Fattal and Anna Maria Maiolino. Prior to Whitechapel Laura was curator at Tate, where she worked on exhibitions of Claude Cahun, Barbara Hepworth, Linder, Liliane Lijn, France-Lise McGurn, Lucy Stein and Rebecca Warren, and group shows such as ‘Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings’ and ‘Turner Prize 2016’. Laura writes extensively on modern and contemporary art, recently contributing chapters to Revisiting Modern British Art and Oxford University Press’s Virginia Woolf Reader, as well as monographs on Pia Arke, Lisa Brice, Lewis Hammond, Sylvia Snowden and Caragh Thuring.
Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski is an archivist and mixed media artist currently pursuing a PhD at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL / Tate Britain). Her doctoral research places much needed critical attention on Jamaican born sculptor Ronald Moody. She holds an MA in Archives and Record Management, International (UCL). She is a member of the Afrofeminist Transatlantic Collaboration which maps and archives the cultural resistance of Black feminist artists in the UK and the Twins Cities and archivist for the Rita Keegan Archive Project. Her practice aims to develop collective, collaborative, archival strategies in relation to physical space, environment, the public and the personal in relation to the African Diaspora.
Dr Pandora Syperek researches the intersections of art and science, gender and the nonhuman within cultures of display. She is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Loughborough University London and Visiting Fellow at the V&A Research Institute. Publications include Oceans: Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2023) and the Journal of Curatorial Studies special issue ‘Curating the Sea’ (2020)(both co-edited with Sarah Wade), book chapters and journal articles on the gendered aesthetics of natural history display, and an entry on ‘Animal Studies’ for the Johns Hopkins Guide to Cultural and Critical Theory. Pandora is co-investigator on the Paul Mellon Centre-funded research project ‘Exhibiting Oceans in the UK Today’ and co-lead on Loughborough’s Institute of Advanced Studies’ 2023-24 annual theme ‘Gestation: Bodies, Technologies, Ecologies, Justice’. She has taught on modern and contemporary art, design and curatorial studies at Loughborough University, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, University College London and York University. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from UCL.
Sofia Victorino is a researcher and curator, and the former Daskalopoulos Director of Education and Public Programmes at the Whitechapel Gallery (2011-2021) where she lead a programme of artists’ residencies and commissions; community projects; public programmes, performance and film. Selected curatorial projects and commissions included artists Mikhail Karikis (2018), Emanuel Almborg (2017), Samson Kambalu (2016), Rivane Neuenschwander (2015), Luke Fowler and Mark Fell (2015), Peter Liversidge (2015), Bart Lodewijks (2014-15), Francis Upritchard (2014), Fraser Muggeridge (2014), Heather and Ivan Morison (2013), Theaster Gates (2013), Claire Pentecost (2013), and the collective Assemble (2017). Sofia is on the Advisory Committee for the William Townsend Memorial Lecture Series at the Slade School of Fine Art; and on the advisory board for the Documents of Contemporary Art series, co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press. She has lectured on the MA Curating the Contemporary (London Metropolitan University) and the MA in Contemporary Art and Education (Goldsmiths). Previously Head of Education and Public Programmes at Serralves Museum of Contemporary art, Porto (2002-2011), her research interests focus on art, social practice and decoloniality.
Jennifer Warren is a researcher and lecturer, interested in the interactions between art institutions and social movements. She is currently based at Central Saint Martins as an AHRC funded PhD candidate within Afterall Research Centre. Her PhD focuses on the case study of Museu D’Art Contemporani Barcelona, through which broader experiments in ‘radical museology’ of the 2000s are critically evaluated. The emergence of so-called ‘progressive’ institutions and their increasing identification with activism, ‘militant research’ and ‘Theory’ are of particular interest. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, and has taught on various courses including BA Fine Art and BA Culture, Curation and Criticism.
Dr Sarah Wade is an art historian and Lecturer in Museum Studies at University of East Anglia. Her research focuses on human-animal relations and representations of wildlife in contemporary art, exhibitions and museum display, particularly with regards to ecological concerns. Sarah holds a PhD in History of Art from University College London and has published widely on extinction and wildlife conservation issues in artistic and curatorial practice. She is co-founder of the Curating the Sea research project, which resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies (2020) and Oceans: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2023). Over the years, Sarah has worked with various museums and heritage organisations in research, project management and curatorial capacities and continues to collaborate with museum colleagues on research projects.
Lydia Yee is the former chief curator at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In her role as chief curator, she oversaw a broad programme of modern and contemporary art exhibitions, new artist commissions, presentations of rarely seen collections from around the world, focused displays from the Whitechapel Gallery’s historic archive, and an extensive programme of publications. Prior to this, she worked as a curator at the Barbican Centre from 2007 to 2015. During her time at the Barbican, exhibitions she curated include Bauhaus: Art as Life, Ron Arad: Restless, and Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene. Prior to joining the Barbican, Lydia was senior curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, where she was responsible for the exhibition programme and collection. She was the recipient of the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award in 2006 for Street Art, Street Life. In 2003, she was the Cassullo Fellow on the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Programme.
Dr. Nayia Yiakoumaki is the Director of the Hellenic Centre in London, Curatorial Studies Consultant at Whitechapel Gallery and Co-Director of the MA Curating Art and Public Programmes since its inception.
From 2005 – 2022 she was a curator and head of curatorial studies and archives at Whitechapel Gallery, where she developed an innovative programme of research exhibitions based on the use of archives as an alternative resource for curatorial practice. She devised the NEON Curatorial Exchange & Award 2011-2020, a scheme which fostered professional relationships for curators in the UK and in Greece, founded by NEON organization. From 2016-2017 she co-directed the Athens Biennale as Director of Research and International Networks and in 2017 she co-curated Waiting for the Barbarians, a statement performance and series of events by the Athens Biennale, during Documenta 14. She has curated more than forty exhibitions including John Latham: Anarchive (2010), Rothko in Britain (2012), Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (2014), Guerrilla Girls: Is it even worse in Europe? (2016-2017), Killed Negatives: Unseen Images of 1930s America (2018), Andreas Lolis: Prosaic Origins (2018), Queer Spaces: London, 1980s – Today (2019) and Out of the Margins: Performance in London Institutions 1990s – 2010s (2022).
