Anna Perach

Anna Perach (1985) lives and works in London, UK. She holds an MFA in fine art (distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London (2020). In 2024 Anna presented an institutional solo show with Gasworks, London, UK. Other solo shows include ADA gallery, Rome, IT (2023), Edel Assanti gallery, London, UK (2022) and Herzliya Museum of contemporary art, Herzliya, IL (2021). Anna has exhibited in international art fairs such as Artissima with ADA gallery where she won the Carol Rama award, Arco Madrid with The Ryder gallery and Art Cologne with Sommer gallery. Significant group exhibitions include Shamans, Communicate with the invisible, Mart, Trento, IT (2023), Threads, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2023), Unruly bodies, Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2023) and Antigone, Richard Saltoun gallery, London, UK. Anna was one of the winners of the Hopper prize (2023),The Ingram Prize and the Gilbert Bayes award (both in 2021). Recent publications include The Guardian and Art Newspaper.

Andrea Khôra

Andrea Khôra is an artist and researcher based in London. Her work centers around the malleability of reality on both personal and societal levels. Andrea's practice-led Ph.D. project, Under the Influence: Expanded Technologies of the Mind, investigates the intersection of expanded consciousness and hegemonic institutions through artistic research and writing.

Andrea's work has been commissioned and exhibited by a number of organizations including: KW Berlin, Germany; Blessed Foundation, London; CIRCA Class of 2022; Kunsthal Charlottenborg Copenhagen, Denmark; The Horse Hospital, London; Gossamer Fog London; The Science Museum, London; Espacio El Dorado, Bogatá, Colombia; Arebyte, London; and more. Andrea will be joining the Summer School as our video and moving image technician.

Catherine Williamson

Catherine Williamson is Professor of Women’s Health at Imperial College London. She is also Consultant in Obstetric Medicine at Queen Charlotte’s, St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospitals. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and is an Honorary Fellow of the RCOG. She is also the Maternal Medicine Representative on the RCOG Genomics Committee. Her research focuses on the causes, complications and ways to treat medical disorders of pregnancy. She particularly works on intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy, gestational diabetes mellitus and severe hyperemesis gravidarum. Her work has influenced national and international guidelines on management of these disorders.

Professor Williamson is also Director of the Tommy’s National Centre for Preterm Birth Research. This is a collaboration between 5 universities (Leeds University, Imperial, King’s, Queen Mary and University College London).

In addition to focussing on cutting edge research to understand the causes, treatments and ways to support families affected by preterm birth, the Centre has an active public engagement programme. This includes supporting artists to engage with people with lived experience of preterm birth in collaboration with Helen Knowles and the Birth Rites Collection.

Courtney Conrad

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. Her debut pamphlet, I Am Evidence, is published by Bloodaxe Books. She is a winner of the Eric Gregory Award, Michael Marks Award, Bridport Prize Young Writers Award and Mslexia Women’s Pamphlet Prize. Shortlisted for The White Review Poet's Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award’s Poetry Prize, the Bridport Poetry Prize, Derby Poetry Festival Poetry Prize and the Poetry Wales Pamphlet competition. She is currently a Cave Canem fellow and an alumna of The London Library Emerging Writers Programme, Barbican Young Poets and Roundhouse Poetry Collective. She has been commissioned by the Museum of London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Fuel Theatre, Apples and Snakes, Victoria & Albert Museum, Guildhall, Tate Britain, BBC 1Xtra, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, The Sidings, John's Hopkins University, The University of Warwick, Wellcome Trust and Spread the Word.

Griselda Pollock (online keynote)

Griselda Pollock is Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art, Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds.

Griselda is the 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize and the 2024 Nessim World Prize for her contribution to feminist-postcolonial-queer-international-socio-historical studies in art history and cultural analysis.

In addition to her now classic texts Old Mistresses: Women, Art & Ideology (1979/1981 new edition 2020 and Framing Feminism (1985), both co-authored with Rozsika Parker, her major publications include Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (1988), Encounters in Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (2007) and After-affects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2013), Art as Com-passion: Bracha L. Ettinger, edited with Catherine de Zegher (Brussels: ASA Press, 2011) and she has edited the writings of artist-theorist Bracha L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics and Ethics: Vol 1 1990-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), which proposes a radically important theory of the matrixial dimensions of subjectivity.

Griselda Pollock’s monograph, Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale University Press), was published in 2018. Killing Men and Dying Women: 1950s New York Painting and Imag(in)ing Difference (MUP, 2022), which includes a discussion of Marilyn Monroe and pregnancy loss and she has written on American artist-photographer Joanne Leonard, whose work, The Miscarriage Journal will be the focus of her keynote presentation.

Hannah Conway

Internationally award-winning composer recognised for her dynamic collaboration with diverse and under-represented communities in eighteen countries to create new music and stories. As Artistic Director of Sound Voice she makes live and immersive musical works collaborating with people with lived experience and the healthcare, scientific, biomedical and technology sectors. Recognition for her work includes an Ivor Novello Academy Award, Classical:NEXT Innovation Award, best non-fiction immersive work at Sheffield Doc Fest Alternate Realities Award and European FEDORA Digital Prize 2023. Her works have encompassed 12 languages and her music has been broadcast on BBC Television and BBC Radio. Previously Artistic Director of Streetwise Opera renowned ground-breaking work with the homeless sector, She also moderates for the European Commission’s flagship cultural conferences.

Helen Knowles

Helen Knowles (b.1975) is an artist and curator of the Birth Rites Collection currently housed in the University of Kent. She has a BA Hons from Glasgow School of Art and and MFA Fine Art from Goldsmiths University.

Her work is held in private and public collections including, Kunsthaus Graz, The Magistrates Organisation, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Gallery Oldham, Tate Library and Archive, The National Art Library, Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, Museum of Motherhood, NY, Birth Rites Collection and MMU Special Collection. Residencies include; Trelex Residency, Switzerland (2019), Fault Lines, Future Everything (2017-2019), HMP Altcourse, Liverpool (2017), Moscow ICA (2015), Santa Fe Arts Institute, New Mexico (2013), Jodrell Bank Science Centre and Arboretum (1999-2001). A recipient of awards from Arts Council England and The Amateurs Trust, she was awarded an honorary mention at Ars Electronica 2020 and the Neo Art Prize, Great Art Prize for two works form the Youtube Portraits Series (2012).

Knowles is preoccupied with the way the immaterial meets forms of life, particularly in the social realm, teasing out questions of responsibility, autonomy and ethics in relation to technology, artificial intelligence and the non-human. Her collaborative, new media practice has included working with indigenous communities in Putumayo, Colombia and Santa Fe, America. As well as medics, midwives, scientists, lawyers, market sellers, oligarchs, crypto currency and blockchain specialists. Recent work includes: ‘Trust the Medicine’. A participatory artwork and 360 film developed in collaboration with design team, Metaobjects which documents a staged psychedelic integration group, with real volunteers and led by a real psychotherapist, which focuses on the phenomenon of encountering entities associated with psychedelic drugs. This work was premiered at Science Gallery London.

Leni Dothan

Dr Leni Dothan is an artist, architect and researcher based in London. Blending her skills and knowledge, Dothan is dealing with the overlooked representations of women and especially mothers in art history and contemporary culture, as well as eco-political urgent subjects. As a mother to a boy living away from her birth home, she creates sculptures, photographs, videos and installations that suggest new narratives other than the ideal iconography of a mother-and-child relationship. With her works, Dothan touches on the less discussed and underrepresented aspects of the mother and child relationship, by doing so, she questions social norms and political structures.

Leni Dothan has exhibited her work in museums around the world, including The Jewish Museum in London, MAMbo Museum in Bologna and Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie in France, as well as galleries, including Richard Saltoun Gallery, Hå Gamle Prestegard in Norway and Arnolfini Gallery as part of Hayward touring exhibition Acts of Creation.