2021

Andrew Durbin is the editor of frieze magazine and the author of the novels MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020), both from Nightboat Books. He is the editor of Jacolby Satterwhite's The Matriarch's Rhapsody (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2021) and Kevin Killian's Fascination: Memoirs (Semiotexte, 2018). His fiction, ar criticism, and poetry have appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. He lives in London.

Lubaina Himid (b. Zanzibar, 1954) lives and works in Preston, UK, and is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. She is the winner of the 2017 Turner Prize.
Himid has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad. In 2021 Himid will present a major monographic exhibition at Tate Modern, London. Other current and forthcoming exhibitions include Risquons-Tout, WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and Everyday Heroes, Southbank Centre, London (both 2020). Significant solo exhibitions include Spotlights, Tate Britain, London (2019); The Grab Test, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands (2019); Lubaina Himid, CAPC Bordeaux, France (2019); Work From Underneath, New Museum, New York (2019); Gifts to Kings, MRAC Languedoc Roussillon Midi-Pyrénées, Sérignan (2018); Our Kisses are Petals, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2018); The Truth Is Never Watertight, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2017); Navigation Charts, Spike Island, Bristol (2017); and Invisible Strategies, Modern Art Oxford (2017). Significant group exhibitions include Slow Painting, Hayward Touring UK travelling exhibition (2020); En Plein Air, The High Line, New York (2019–2020); Sharjah Biennial 14, UAE (2019); Glasgow International (2018); Berlin Biennale (2018); The Place is Here, Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2017); Keywords, Tate Liverpool (2014); and Burning Down the House, Gwangju Biennale (2014). Her work is held in various museum and public collections, including Tate; British Council Collection; Arts Council Collection; UK Government Art Collection; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; National Museums Liverpool; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. A monograph, titled Lubaina Himid: Workshop Manual, was released in 2019 from Koenig Books.

Fatoş Üstek is an independent curator and writer. She was Director of Liverpool Biennial (2019-20), a jury member for Turner Prize Bursaries 2020, Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021, Scotland in Venice 2022, Dutch Pavilion 2022, and served as an external member of the acquisitions committee for the Arts Council Collection (2018-2020). She is the curator of Do Ho Suh’s largest UK commission (2018-2020). She was formerly Director and Chief Curator of DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation), curated miart Talks 2018; Art Night, East London, 2017 and fig-2 50 exhibitions in 50 weeks, ICA, 2015. She acted as Associate Curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennale, 2014. Ustek is a contributing editor to Extra Extra Magazine, a founding member of the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA); trustee of Art Night; board member of Urbane Kunste Ruhr; advisory panel for Jan van Eyck Academie; member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) UK; and an ICI alumni. Recently, Ustek delivered keynote lectures at London City Hall, Tate Modern, Leicester University and presented papers in conferences held in the UK, Europe, and South America. She publishes regularly in exhibition catalogues and art magazines, and was the co-founding Editor of Nowiswere (2008-12).

Thomas Duggan is an inventor who has a love for nature, design, materials, architecture, science, advanced generative design, technology, craft and robotic fabrication. His work chronicles explorations into design, sculpture, site-specific installations, engineering, architecture, material science, traditional craftsmanship and research. He studied at Central St. Martins, London, UDK, Berlin and TUFTS, USA.
He is passionate about reconnecting people with the natural environment through design, art, bioengineering, architecture and sustainability. His work merges technical and functional to ethereal and mysterious. He has exhibited internationally at galleries such as the V&A London, Somerset House, London Design Festival, PS1, MoMA and the Salone Del Mobile. He has been collaborating with TUFTS, MIT, RCA, Harvard and Autodesk in recent years as well as developing his own practice.

Priya Khanchandani specialises in the dissemination of ideas about contemporary design and Indian culture through curating, writing and arts management. She is head of Curatorial at The Design Museum.
Priya studied Modern Languages at Cambridge University, and History of Design at the RCA. She has worked as Development Manager at the V&A, and as Head of Arts Programmes for the British Council India where she curated the Reimagine arts programme, working with 22 UK cultural organisations on realising new and exciting work in India.
Since 2016, Priya has worked as a writer, curator and regular speaker on design and decolonising culture, based in London. She has also published short fiction and won a nomination for the Asian Writer Award. As of 2017, she is a Trustee of Engage and co-runs Museums Detox, a collective of museum professionals campaigning for greater diversity in the arts. In 2018, she was appointed Editor of ICON magazine. She also curated the India Pavilion at London Design Biennale, held at Somerset House and titled State of Indigo. She has been invited to join the National Panel for the 2019 Civic Trust Awards for architecture.

TF Chan is the Commissioning Editor at Wallpaper* magazine.

Tarek is Artistic Director and CEO of Battersea Arts Centre. Previous roles include Director for Theatre at Arts Council England and Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio. Tarek was also one of the founders and Associate Artistic Director of the Yard Theatre in Hackney. Prior to embarking on a career as a director and writer, he held a wide variety of senior management roles in the National Health Service.

Inspired by the taboos, stigmas, anomalies and social injustices she sees around her Kimmings creates mind-blowing, multi-platform art works to provoke change. The work generally has a theatrical outcome but often incorporates many other mediums, including high profile PR and social campaigning.

Previous works have seen her retracing an STI to its source, spending 7 days in a controlled environment in a constant state of intoxication, becoming a pop star invented and managed by a 9 year-old and tackling depression in men.

Bryony's award-winning work has toured across the world: Antifest (Finland), Culturgest (Portugal), Fusebox Festival (Texas), The Southbank Centre (London), Melbourne International Comedy Festival (Aus) and Lisinski Opera House (Croatia).

Her work also extends to broadcasting. Bryony created the documentary 'Artist in Residence: The Sex Clinic' (Channel 4) and has appeared on 'As Yet Untitled' (UKTV) and 'Where's the F in News' (BBC Radio 4) multiple times. Kimmings co-wrote the box office smash feature film, Last Christmas (Universal), with Emma Thompson, directed by Paul Feig and recently made the documentary 'Opera Mums with Bryony Kimmings' for BBC4.

Bryony's most recent stage show I'm a Phoenix, Bitch has received stellar acclaim and sold out shows. She performed two runs of the show at BAC in London and an extended run of the sold out show at the Edinburgh Fringe receiving more 5 star reviews and praise. She has since performed the show at The HOME Theatre in Manchester, and Sydney and Perth festivals with more UK dates to come.

Kimmings also mentors artists, teaches workshops, writes a popular arts blog and speaks on panels. She is an associate artist at Soho Theatre and has worked on projects with the Royal Court Theatre, Southbank Centre and Complicite.

John E. McGrath is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Manchester International Festival.

His first Festival in 2017 featured world premieres from leading international artists; a new digital direction for MIF; a series of participatory commissions in public spaces, and My Festival a year-round programme forging closer connections with Manchester communities. In 2019 John commissioned artists including Yoko Ono, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Idris Elba and Tania Bruguera to make work for the largest ever edition of MIF.

As Chief Executive of MIF John will also be responsible for The Factory, a flagship cultural space currently being built in the heart of Manchester, which will have a year-round programme of new work from the world’s greatest artists, offering a space to make, explore and experiment.

John was previously Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales, where he achieved a reputation for large-scale site-specific work, digital innovation and extraordinary community involvement. He has worked as a theatre director in New York and London and was Artistic Director of Contact Theatre in Manchester from 1999 to 2008. Awards include the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) Cultural Leadership Award (2005) and an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University (2015). His book 'Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space' was published by Routledge in 2004.

Soprano Juliet Fraser has a repertoire dominated by the very old and the very new. She regularly appears as a guest soloist with contemporary music ensembles Musikfabrik, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, Plus-Minus and Talea. She is also a core member of EXAUDI vocal ensemble, which she co-founded with composer/conductor James Weeks in 2002. Juliet is an active commissioner of new music and has worked particularly closely with composers Michael Finnissy, Cassandra Miller, Rebecca Saunders and Matthew Shlomowitz, with recent premieres at festivals such as Aldeburgh, Huddersfield, Maerzmusik, ManiFeste and Musikfest Berlin. Her discography includes Morton Feldman’s Three Voices (Hat Hut), Bernhard Lang’s The Cold Trip, part 2 (Kairos), Michael Finnissy’s Andersen-Liederkreis (Hat Hut) and a binaural recording of Milton Babbitt’s Philomel (all that dust), as well as portrait discs of Cassandra Miller (all that dust) and Frank Denyer (another timbre). An album of solo works written for her by Lisa Illean, Sivan Eldar, Nomi Epstein and Lawrence Dunn was released earlier this year on the HCR label. Juliet is increasingly in demand as a speaker, exploring topics such as collaboration, authorship, and the voice and the body in recent written papers. She is the founder and artistic director of the eavesdropping series in London, and co-director with Mark Knoop and Newton Armstrong of all that dust, a new label for new music.

Recently acclaimed in the Daily Telegraph as "the trailblazing leader the arts desperately need", Wasfi Kani founded Grange Park Opera in 1998. In 2016, the company moved to Surrey, building a new opera house at West Horsley Place. Kani was born in 1956 in Cable Street in London's East End, and is almost certainly the only opera impresario who spent her childhood in a house with an outside lavatory. A violinist, she played for the National Youth Orchestra and went on to study music at St Hilda's College, Oxford. After 10 years in the city, programming and designing financial computer systems, she started a small computer consultancy which gave her the flexibility to spend more time conducting. By 1993, she had made music her full-time career. In 1992, Wasfi was made Chief Executive of Garsington Opera in Oxford. Wasfi Kani is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and RIBA. She received an OBE in the New Year's Honours List 2002 for her work in bringing her second opera company, Pimlico Opera, into prisons.

Orlando Gough is a composer (and sometimes lyricist, librettist, music director, MC, recording engineer, cookery writer), who writes operas, choral music, music-theatre, music for dance and theatre, and creates large-scale site-specific work.

www.orlandogough.com

Jean McNeil is the author of 14 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, travel and essays. Her work has won or been shortlisted for major international awards. Most recently she won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival for Ice Diaries, an account of her year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey and which was also named as one of the best nature books of the year by The Guardian in 2018. She has also undertaken official residencies in the Svalbard archipelago, inthe Falkland Islands and aboard ship-based scientific expeditions the length of the Atlantic Ocean and to Baffin Bay and Greenland. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society for the Arts and is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Lucia Pietroiusti works at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, usually outside of the gallery format. She is Curator of General Ecology at Serpentine Galleries, London; as well as the curator of Sun & Sea (Marina) - the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (and international tour). She will be a curator of the 2020-2021 Shanghai Biennale (with Marina Otero Verzier, Filipa Ramos, You Mi, and Chief Curator: Andrés Jaque). Current projects include the recurring festival on consciousness across species, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (with Filipa Ramos), the forthcoming publication, More-than-Human (with Andrés Jaque and Marina Otero Verzier) and the publication and research project, Microhabitable (with Fernando García-Dory, Matadero/Madrid and INLAND/Campo Adentro). At Serpentine, Pietroiusti founded and runs General Ecology, a strategic effort to embed environmental subjects and methods throughout the Galleries’ outputs and networks, as well as Back to Earth, gathering 65+ artist campaigns for the environment. The General Ecology Network, currently in development, convenes 100+ individuals and organisations across disciplines to prototype artist-led, environmentally driven systems change and bridge the knowledge/translation gap between culture, creativity and ecology. Pietroiusti was the co-founder, and is currently co-curator and co-presenter, of the Serpentine Podcast.

Annie O'Garra Worsley is a writer and blogger who lives in the North West Highlands of Scotland on a small-holding known as a croft. She is also a physical geographer and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society with particular interests in spatial and temporal relationships between people and the natural world. Her academic research has examined human impacts in the montane rainforests of New Guinea, the peatbogs, hills and coasts of North West England, and the spatial and temporal history of pollution in urban environments. Although trained as a scientist Annie has always used visual arts and non-academic prose to inform and underpin her science, research communication and university teaching. After a career break raising her four children, she returned to full-time academic life in 1999 and was awarded a Personal Chair in Environmental Change in 2009 by Edge Hill University.

Today, Annie writes about the geography, geology and nature of her Highland home in a blog. Alongside articles in scientific journals, Annie's non-academic essays have been published by Elliott & Thompson in their four 'Seasons' anthologies and by Elementum Journal where she was partnered with well-known visual artists from around the UK in Elementum's unique and beautiful contemporary works on nature and story.

With her academic training and professional research Annie is particularly interested in how all aspects of the natural world inform and influence art and creativity and vice versa.

She believes now more than ever, as society faces considerable uncertainty generated by global climate change, environmental degradation and earth's 7th mass extinction and when scientific knowledge is largely found in specialist publications, that the merging of creative arts and science is essential.