Research Careers in the Cultural Sector: Curators Roundtable

Alice Correia is an independent art historian. Her research examines late twentieth-century British art, with a specific focus on artists of African, Caribbean and South Asian heritage. She has worked at Tate Britain, Government Art Collection and the Universities of Sussex and Salford. She has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art and the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute. She is a co-chair of the British Art Network’s Black British Art Research Group and she is the editor of What is Black Art? Writings on African, Asian and Caribbean art in Britain, 1981–1989, Penguin Classics, 2022. With Derek Horton, she curated A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s at Touchstones Rochdale, 2023.

Priyesh Mistry is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London where he works towards an ambitious programme to integrate contemporary art within the context of the museum and its historic collections. He manages the Artists in Residency programmes and contemporary commissions. Recent projects include Ali Cherri: If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed?; Dance to the Music of Our Time: A Live Exhibition with Hetain Patel, Florence Peake, Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo; Rosalind Nashashibi: An Overflow of Passion and Sentiment; and upcoming projects with Nalini Malani and Céline Condorelli. Previously, he was assistant curator, International Art at Tate Modern where he specialised on art from South Asia for the collection and co-curated the Hyundai Commission 2019: Kara Walker in the Turbine Hall, the major retrospective on Anni Albers (2018) and the group exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017) as well as numerous collection displays.

Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC) at Coventry University and leads on the centre’s Critical Practices research strand. She is a researcher and curator whose work explores “the curatorial” as an investigative practice, expanding practice-based research in the fields of curating, visual arts, visual cultures and cultural studies. Rito is executive board member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum; research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; founding editor of The Contemporary Journal; and chair for the Collaborative Research Working Group for the Midlands Higher Education and Culture Forum (MHECF). Rito is the co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg, 2020), Architectures of Education (e-flux Architecture, 2020) and Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era (Open Humanities Press, forthcoming). Rito is editor of “On Translations” (2018) and “Critical Pedagogies” (2019) issues (The Contemporary Journal). She has published in international journals such as King’s Review, Mousse Magazine and Wrong Wrong. From 2017 to 2019, she was Head of Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, leading the institution’s research strategy with Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. She holds a PhD in curatorial/knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she taught from 2014 to 2016. She lectures internationally – in Europe, South America and the Middle East – on her research and curatorial studies.