ECRN & DRN Summer Symposium: British Art and Architecture in the Digital Age

Melissa L Gustin is Curator of British Art at National Museums Liverpool, based at the Walker Art Gallery. She received her PhD in 2018 from the University of York on American neoclassical sculptors in Rome. Her research interests cover eighteenth- and nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture and painting, women artists, classical reception and weird art histories including mermaids, mushrooms and 3D scanning. She recently curated the Sculpture Walk at Treasure House Art Fair 2025 and is currently curating an exhibition as part of the Turner 250 celebrations, called Turner: Always Contemporary at the Walker Art Gallery (25 October 2025–22 February 2026). She is also (very slowly) writing a book on G. F. Watts and his use of art history as a carrier of meaning across his practice. 

Klaudia Kondraciuk is an art history researcher and a doctoral student at the University of East London. She balances theoretical inquiry with practical engagement in the arts. Having interned at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, being a Tate student ambassador, Klaudia curated her olfactory and poetry event for the Kent Postgraduate Arts Festival in Paris where she completed her master’s degree. Currently, her PhD research is centred around transcultural heroism and the exchange of samurai ideals and Pre-Raphaelite virtue in art and exhibitions between Victorian England and Meiji Japan. Previously, she delivered a series of lectures at the University of Westminster in sex and gender studies and is excited to make her first appearance within PMC’s Early Career Researchers Network. 

Hyojae Kim is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of affect studies, medical fetishism, archival erotics, and trans-resonant visual practices. She is currently completing a practice-based MRes in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London. Her current project, Burning Shell, reimagines the history of fetish not as pathology, but as a language of care, containment, and erotic agency. Engaging with Victorian secrecy, enigmatic objects, and nineteenth-century drawing and photography, she explores archival affect as a method of care, investigating how uncertainty, absence, and gesture might open non-normative ways of seeing, feeling, and remembering through fragmented historical traces.

Aslihan Caroupapoullé is an early career researcher (Kingston University) and architect exploring a new poetics of architecture grounded in dialogue, considering contemporary needs and historical conditions. Her current research centres on World Heritage Sites, developing a hermeneutic design approach that interprets architecture as a deeply situated manifestation of culture. Through the practice of collage, she creates metaphorical constructions that reveal the latent structure of a place as both reference and inspiration. Her work has been featured in international publications and exhibitions and she has lectured and served as a guest critic in design studios. This work builds on her AHRC-funded PhD research investigating these interconnected themes. 

Parham Ghalamdar is an Iranian-British multidisciplinary artist whose work unearths lost mythologies, decaying philosophies and visual detritus to construct speculative worlds where memory and futurism blur. Influenced by cybernetics and machine vision, Parham explores how feedback loops and simulations shape our perception of history and possibility. Through painting, film and writing, he conjures narratives that feel unearthed from both ancient ruins and distant futures. 

His recent solo exhibitions include Painting, An Unending at HOME, Manchester and Deep Desert Objekt at Pipeline Contemporary, London. His work has been shown at institutions such as the Whitworth, Manchester Art Gallery and the Lowry. Parham has received support from ACE Project Grant & DYCP, and the UK New Artists Bursary, and is represented in the Government Art Collection. He is currently a scholarship recipient at The New Centre for Research & Practice and a 2024/25 APP Creative Commissions awardee at Leeds Arts University. 

Sophie Mak-Schram works with decolonial and radical pedagogies to engage people in shared processes of longing and belonging. Often using the metaphor of the “tool” – as a poetic and practical object – Sophie works with collaborators to make tools that can shift power, gather groups and offer ways of being in relation (to each other, to place, to institutions) differently. 

In the years 2021-24 Sophie completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie-funded PhD about radical forms of learning in practices we might recognise as "art" as part of FEINART, a project about the future(s) of socially engaged practices. Between 2024–25, Sophie was Curriculum Redefined Teaching Excellence Lecturer of Art Pedagogies at the University of Leeds, Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry and one of seven commissioned artists working on decolonising Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Sophie is currently a lecturer in fine art at Cardiff Metropolitan University and Civic Fellow at BAK Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries. 

Katherine Mitchell is a researcher of contemporary art, digital culture and heritage practices, with a PhD in Digital Culture and Communications from Birkbeck, University of London. Her AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral project, based at the Victoria and Albert Museum, explored how digital objects challenge traditional museum value systems, expectations and collecting practices. Her research probes the ontological instability of digital objecthood, the limits of representation and thresholds of failure. Katherine has an academic and professional background in architecture, an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies and has taught at Birkbeck, Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art. 

Laura Russell is an architectural researcher based at the Centre for Research Architecture in Goldsmiths, London. Her practice engages with the fields of Feminist science studies and Queer theory to investigate the technologies weaponised by state, corporate and colonial actors to discipline, survey, securitise and pollute space, bodies and (hi)stories. She is currently exploring the widening application of 3D technologies within the GLAM sector, questioning what the emancipatory potential contained within practices of forgetting, loss and destruction could do for the defunct museum project. 

Polina Chizhova-Wright is a curator and artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She is a doctoral candidate in Curating and Architecture at the Manchester Metropolitan University funded by The Leverhulme Unit for the Design of Cities of the Future (LUDeC), where she is researching the curatorial role in making ‘smart’ cities more inclusive through the lens of socially-engaged artistic practices. Polina is also the Co-Director of Videocity UK, which promotes video art in public spaces with the aim to discuss current social issues and connect art with everyday life. 

Melanie Lenz is Curator of Digital Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum where she is responsible for developing their digital art collections. She has organised multiple exhibitions, most recently co-curating Patric Prince: Digital Art Visionary (2023–24). She co-edited the book Digital Art: 1960s to Now (2024) and has published on diverse topics including: generative art (2024); early computer art in Latin America (2018); gender, art and technology (2014); and collecting and conserving digital art (2011). Melanie has led on a broad range of public programmes including developing a Digital Art Season, convened conferences on art, design and new technologies for health, and has initiated art partnerships with a variety of organisations including Women Who Code and Great Ormond Street Hospital. Based in London, she is a judge for the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology and is a panel expert for the National Archives.