Biography

I am a curator with over 20 years’ experience in the cultural, arts, academic and private sectors. I currently work at UAL: University of the Arts London on the AHRC Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage research project, and as Research Curator for the Museum of Cornish Life leading new curatorial research into historical and contemporary significance of farming within social history and folk museums.

I am a Fellow of the Museums Association and a former member of its Ethics Committee, accredited facilitator with the Association of Facilitators (2017-2021) and Honorary Research Fellow in the College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University.

In 2022 I was awarded an Art Fund Headley Fellowship and a Fellowship by the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) on their Exchange Programme for International Curators. From 2018 to 2021 I led the Citizen Curators, a work based curatorial training programme for volunteers across seven museums in Cornwall, in collaboration with Cornwall Museums Partnership, supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund. In 2016 to 2018 I completed an intensive programme of leadership development as one of Arts Council England‘s prestigious Change Makers.

I am a material culture and collections specialist with particular interests in object-centred research, public collections, the role of the museum curator, professional ethics, policymaking and trends, and alternative understandings of the circulation and exchange of art and artefacts, especially those from subaltern or decolonial viewpoints.

I have a specialist interest in gems, metals and jewellery and gained my Certificate in Gemmology from Gem-A, the Gemmological Association of Great Britain in 2022 with distinction and blog about the science and magic of gems on my website. In my spare time I play traditional Celtic, English and medieval music on the fiddle.