New Contemporaries 2024-2025 Artist Mentor Bios
Speaking fantasy to power, Louise Ashcroft’s work creates situations and stories which unravel contemporary culture, remixing primary and secondary research in order to speculate alternative ways of seeing and being; giving voice to hidden histories and experimental futures. Recent projects include: a residency at OOF Gallery making works about Women’s football; a collaboration with an evolutionary biologist at UCL; a project about waste tips in Exeter; and nursery rhymes about childlessness for a show at Kunstmuseum St.Gallen. www.louiseashcroft.org
Adelaide Bannerman is a curator and curatorial director at commercial gallery Tiwani Contemporary. Bannerman has been working curatorially on productions that include commissions, exhibitions, and events, since 1998. She graduated from the MA Fine Art Administration and Curatorship programme in 2001, and has formally developed her thinking and practice with agencies prioritising and promoting global contemporary artistic practice and critical perspectives, from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and its diasporas, and more recently Australia. Pursuing these objectives, she has worked with the following organisations: Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001-2017), International Curators Forum (2007-2021), and Autograph (2011-2016).
Emma Edmondson is an artist and organiser from Southend-on-Sea. Studying and graduating during the 2008 financial crash alternative economies, precarity and utopian community are at the centre of her research and practice. She works with sculpture, print, text and education and is interested in how recessions and austerity shape how we survive creatively.
In 2016 she set up TOMA an accessible artist-run education model which is currently the only postgrad-ish level art programme in Essex after all others were stopped by their host universities. TOMA sits outside the traditional institutional model and was born of and been shaped by austerity and the decades long businessification and dismantling of creative education. These are the politics that bought TOMA into existence. Recently she has been processing raw clay dug from the ground and exploring local land rights to create sculptures that sit on the ground they were made from, marking out little know public rights of way to encourage local people’s use of them. She always works collaboratively believing in collaboration over competition and the power of people coming together to change sector policy, systems and rules.
Seán Elder is a curator and writer from the Scottish Highlands, currently based in London, UK. They are currently the Curatorial Fellow at Cubitt, London, where their programme 'Feeling Still in a World Which Runs' is currently unfolding. Educated at Schools of Art in Birmingham, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, Elder recently completed a doctoral research project examining the roles and potentials of affect within curatorial writing practices. Previously they were Associate Curator at Grand Union, Birmingham, and has worked independently with a number of organisations and artists to develop writing, exhibitions, screenings, and events. Elder has grown from, through, and with relationships with artists including; Gordon Douglas, Rami George, Benny Nemer, Kirsty Russell, Tako Taal, Rehana Zaman and many more, with organisations including; Jerwood Arts, London; Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee; Grand Union, Birmingham; BALTIC 39, Newcastle; The Stuart Croft Foundation; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Hospitalfield, Arbroath; BEK, Bergen; LUX Scotland.
Kim McAleese is a curator originally from Belfast, now based in Scotland. She is currently working as Director of Edinburgh Art Festival, and previously was Programme Director of Grand Union, Birmingham. Her practice is centred around sharing, listening, supporting, caring, conversing and exchanging.
She was an Associate Lecturer at University of Birmingham, is Vice-Chair of Outburst Queer Arts Festival and has served on the board of New Art West Midlands and Visual Artist Ireland. In 2021 she was on the jury to nominate and choose the winner of the Turner Prize, and this year was on the jury to select the artist for the British Pavilion at Venice, 2024.
Sim Panaser holds the position of Curator at Chapter Art Centre. Sim has previously held curatorial positions at Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Middlesex University, Southwark Park Galleries and the UK Government Art Collection. She’s passionate about collaborating with artists and audiences to facilitate critical and creative thinking about the world and our agency within it.
Amanprit Sandhu is a curator and educator with a focus on expanded exhibition and curatorial practices, collaborative approaches to working. Her recent curatorial work includes co-curating the 2021 Borås Art Biennial in Borås, Sweden and organising the inaugural Brent Biennial in Brent, London in 2020. She is a Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts and was an artistic advisor for syllabus VI - a national, collaboratively-produced alternative learning programme supporting artists over a period of time. In Autumn 2024 she will be curator in residence at Chelsea Space where she’ll be researching the potential and politics of noise.
Katie Simpson, born in Peterborough (UK), 1989, is Curator of Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary. Previously, she held the positions of Studio Manager & Exhibitions Hub Curator within the Art Department at Goldsmiths (London), Co-Director at not-for-profit art organisation Jupiter Woods (London) and Curatorial Assistant at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (London). In 2020 she participated in the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s YCRP (Young Curator’s Residency Programme) co-curating the exhibition Waves Between Us (Turin). In a freelance capacity, she mentors and supports artists with funding, grant, and residency application writing, and with the development of artistic and curatorial projects. She received a BFA in Visual Culture from the University of Brighton (2013) and MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths (2018).
Jessica Vaughan is a curator whose work focuses on placing contemporary art in the public realm. Her expanded practice intersects art and social practice, holding collaboration, site specificity and audience access at its core. As Senior Curator of Art on the Underground, Transport for London’s contemporary art programme, she leads the curatorial programming of artworks experienced by millions every day. Previously she worked for several of London’s leading arts organisations, including Studio Voltaire, Tate Modern, The Showroom and Serpentine Gallery. She studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art.
Hannah Wallis is an artist, curator and d/Deaf activist, originally from Leicester. Having previously worked within the exhibitions team at Nottingham Contemporary and the programme team at Wysing Arts Centre, Hannah now works as co-programme director at Grand Union, Birmingham alongside access consultation work. In 2020-2021, Hannah completed a curatorial residency at Wysing Arts Centre as part of Future Curator's Network – a programme supporting the career development of D/deaf and Disabled curators in partnership with DASH – and now serves as associate advisor to the programme.
Committed to the long-term application of accessibility practices and the working rights of artists, Hannah has worked with Aural Diversity, Deafroots, British Art Network, the Victoria & Albert Museum, National Gallery, London, Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam and Voices in the Gallery; and currently serves as Trustee for a-n Artists Information Company and Collective Text as well as sitting on the advisory panel for Two Queens Gallery, Leicester.
With a practice that explores the nuances of communication and sensory deprivation, Hannah's work sits at the intersection of access, equity and embodied transformation.
Collaborating under the moniker of Dyad Creative with artist Théodora Lecrinier since 2014, and supported by organisations including a-n, East Street Arts, National Centre for Writing, Kettle’s Yard, and Arts Council England, Hannah has previously led residency programmes and learning projects, developed interactive commissions and curatorial research, as well as managing several temporary artist-led spaces.
Sam Will is Assistant Director at Sadie Coles HQ. After graduating from Central Saint Martins with a BA in Fine Art, he worked for various arts organisations including Hauser & Wirth and Bold Tendencies before starting at Sadie Coles HQ in 2018. At the gallery, he is a salesperson and an artist liaison, and for the past three years he has also programmed its project space, The Shop, inviting emerging galleries and curators to exhibit.
Previous mentors have included John Eng Kiet Bloomfield, Ama Josephine Budge, Benjamin Cook, Lucy Day, Anne Duffau, Mary Doyle, Ceri Hand, Evan Ifekoya, Janice McLaren, Chris Rawcliffe, Soraya Rodriguez, Borbála Soós and Bolanle Tajudeen.
