On Art Becoming Public

Claudia Di Tosto is a PhD candidate in history of art at the University of Warwick in collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre. She is researching the history of the British Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale through the lenses of global and national art histories, exhibition history and postcolonial theory to explore the Pavilion as a site of national self-definition and redefinition. Prior to starting the PhD, she worked for various institutions such as: IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland); V&A (London, UK); Vatican Museums – Modern and Contemporary Art Department; and MAXXI – National Museum of 21st-Century Arts (Rome, Italy). Most recently, she was the co-convenor of the Doctoral Researchers Network at the Paul Mellon Centre for the academic year 2022/23 and held a position as associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. 

Juliet Jacques was born in Redhill, Surrey in 1981. She has published six books, including Trans: A Memoir (2015), two short story collections including Variations (2021), Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007–2021 (2022) and a novella, Monaco (2023). Her fiction, journalism and essays have appeared in the Guardian including her “Transgender Journey” column, longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2011; New York Times; Frieze; London Review of Books; and many other publications. Her short films have screened in galleries and festivals across the world. She teaches at the Royal College of Art and elsewhere, hosted the arts discussion programme Suite (212) on Resonance 104.4fm and is a co-host of Pro Revolution Soccer. She has played football for Clapton Community FC, Horley Town and Surrey. 

Ben Cranfield was a senior tutor on the Curating Contemporary Art programme, RCA for eight years. As a cultural facilitator, he has curated and led workshops for many arts organisations, including Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, ICA London, Nottingham Contemporary, Bow Arts Trust, Peer UK, A New Direction and Bricks Bristol. His research is focused on the relationship between the curatorial, the contemporary, the archive and forms of instituting, asking what it is to produce non-normative ideas of timeliness and history. In Spring 2024, he undertook a Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) Mid-Career Fellowship to develop the book project, With Time: Curating the Contemporary in Post-War Britain. He has written extensively on the curatorial in articles including: “More than a Meeting: Performing the Workshop in the Art Institution”, Performance Research (2023); “Mind the Gap: Unfolding the Proximities of the Curatorial”, Performance Research (2017); “All Play and No Work? A ‘Ludistory’ of the Curatorial as Transitional Object at the Early ICA”, Tate Papers (2014); “Not Another Museum: The Search for Contemporary Connection”, Journal of Visual Culture (2013). 

Fiona Anderson is an art historian based in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University. Her work explores Queer art histories from the 1970s to the present, particularly in the context of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and in relation to preservation and archiving practices in the USA and Europe. She is the author of Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her writing has also been published in Third Text, Journal of American Studies and Oxford Art Journal. From 2016–19, she was UK lead for “Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV)”, a collaborative research project which explored and reconstructed aspects of LGBTQ+ social and sexual cultures of the 1970s and examined their significance for LGBTQ+ people, Queer organising and artmaking across Europe in the present and future. Fiona is also a DJ. Her Newcastle-based radio show and club night Wildflowers offer a Queer feminist and global perspective on country music, folk and Americana. 

Prior to her work at the Barber Institute, Jennifer Powell was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and an associate professor at the University of Cambridge. She is a respected scholar in the field of modern and contemporary art, especially sculpture and exhibition cultures since 1945, an area in which she has published widely. Jennifer begun her curatorial career with the V&A before taking up the post of assistant curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain in 2010. She was appointed Head of Collections, Programme and Research at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge in 2013, and played a key role in the gallery’s major capital extension project. 

Hana Leaper co-convenes the BAN-affiliated Post-War British Paintings in Regional Collections research group. Hana's co-published forthcoming book Collaborative Art History in Practice: Post 1945 UK Art Collections and Regional Research Ecosystems is due to be published with Routledge. 

Ella Nixon is a final year doctoral candidate at Northumbria University. Her thesis, “Beyond the National: the Representation of Women Artists in Regional Art Galleries” is a Northern Bridge AHRC-funded Doctoral Award, in collaboration with the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Ella is also a research associate at the Arts Council Collection and has recently completed a two-year research project at The Women’s Art Collection (Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge), where she curated the exhibition Conversation Not Spectacle (September 2024 – March 2025). Before beginning her thesis, Ella completed a history BA at the University of Cambridge and a history of art MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialised in twentieth-century British art. Academic publications include British Art Studies, Journal of Museum Education (GEM) and the Women’s Art Journal. Ella also writes for ArtReview, The Critic and Art UK. 

Lynda Nead is a Visiting Professor of History of Art at the The Courtauld Institute of Art, having previously been Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on a range of art historical subjects and particularly on the history of British visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent book is The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press). She has a number of advisory roles in national art museums and galleries and is a Trustee of the Holburne Museum and of Campaign for the Arts. Her latest book British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain will be published in the Paul Mellon Centre Studies in British Art series in autumn 2025.

Ese Onojeruo is a London-based curator and film producer, currently working as assistant curator, Young People’s Programmes at Tate. Her practice focuses on reimagining institutional spaces and structures for bodies that are often marginalised or “othered”. She is particularly interested in shared experiences of exclusion as sites for alternative knowledge production. Over the years, she has worked with institutions such as Tate, Chisenhale Gallery and South London Gallery, with a commitment to fostering community and supporting emerging artists. She has developed initiatives such as Narration Group, a collective for women and non-binary people of colour to rearticulate their narratives, and Curating Black Art, a four-week course with Black Blossoms School of Art exploring how hegemonic structures shape the positioning and perception of Black artists. As a producer, Ese continues to support artistic development, having worked as a studio associate for Anthea Hamilton and produced films including Primetime by Anthea Hamilton (Hayward Gallery, 2022), I Carry It With Me Everywhere by Turab Shah and Arwa Aburawa (2022), Undercurrent 528 by Evan Ifekoya (2021), The Only Good System Is a Soundsystem by Black Obsidian Sound System (2021), and Resilient Responses (Tate, 2020).  

Lily Ford is a filmmaker and historian. She produces creative documentary film features with the Derek Jarman Lab at Birkbeck, University of London, namely The Hexagonal Hive and A Mouse in a Maze (2024), with Bartek Dziadosz, Tilda Swinton and Simon Fisher Turner, and The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016). Lily has directed a number of films on history and art, including The Man who Painted his House (2025), Aerial Bodies (2022), Chasing the Revolution: Marie Langer, Psychoanalysis and Society (2022) and A Humbrol Art: The Paintings of George Shaw (2018). She teaches on the Pittsburgh-London Film Programme and runs workshops on research-led filmmaking through the Derek Jarman Lab. Her interest in women in aviation manifests in written and film outputs, most recently with Light Hands on the archive newsreel footage of women making aeroplanes during the First World War, voted one of Sight and Sound magazine’s best video essays of 2024. 

Madeleine Kennedy is a curator interested in exploring the radical potential of anti-ableism in reimagining what exhibitions can be and do. She currently works as a curator at the Wellcome Collection and sits on the British Council’s Artist Advisory Panel for Venice Biennale 2026. Her curatorial experience varies from leadership roles such as Keeper of Art at the Hatton Gallery – where she helped steward the organisation’s major redevelopment and devise its reopening exhibition programme – to project-based engagements in the UK, Canada, Finland and the USA focused on accessibility, contemporary collecting and publishing. She has curated over twenty exhibitions and commissions since 2014, formerly running the contemporary commissioning programme at the Laing Art Gallery and working in curatorial departments at Tate Britain and Firstsite Gallery. She has also taught as a lecturer in exhibition studies at Liverpool John Moores University, sat on the 2024 selection panel for the disabled-led commissioning organisation Unlimited, and has served on the board of the Art Fund, the UK’s national charity for art, since 2020. Her forthcoming project “Imagined Exhibitions” – which evolved out of her doctoral research at Oxford University – experiments with intuition-centred, collaborative and speculative curatorial methods to support artist-led projects that imagine exhibitions otherwise. 

Dominic Bilton is a project producer, working primarily on the Whitworth’s adult public programme, and a socially engaged curator. With Imogen Holmes-Roe, he co-curated the exhibition (Un)Defining Queer in collaboration with the charity LGBT Foundation in Manchester. He is currently working on the new socially engaged exhibition, Recoverist Curators in collaboration with the “recoverist” arts organisation, Portraits of Recovery. Dominic developed the project Queering the Whitworth providing a framework for the Whitworth’s LGBTQIA+ focused programming. His writing can be found in the journal Stages, which is published by Liverpool Biennial, and he has co-edited the special edition of the journal Art and the Public Sphere: Queer(ing) Art, Curation and Collaboration. Dominic has taught on the MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies: Curating Art module at the University of Manchester, where he also supervises MA dissertations. His current research interests are in the innovative approaches to socially engaged museum practice, Arte Útil and the Constituent Museum, Queering and curatorial approaches to care. 

Jonathan P. Watts is researching a PhD on EASTinternational, an annual open submission exhibition, organised by Lynda Morris, that took placed at Norwich University of the Arts from 1991–2009. Jonathan has published widely on contemporary art and, prior to beginning his PhD, was a tutor in contemporary art practice at the Royal College of Art, London.   

Saim Demircan’s research is focused on how exhibitions are seen through their image, and the slippage between artwork and documentation. In recent years, he has curated shows at galleries, artist-run spaces and public institutions in China, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA. In 2017, he was the recipient of the Goethe-Institut New York’s curatorial residency program, where he curated a twelve-month programme of exhibitions and events at Ludlow 38 in New York City's Lower East Side. Between 2012 and 2015 he was a curator at Kunstverein München and, in 2016, curator-in-residence at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. Previously, he curated a two-year programme of offsite projects at Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea.