About the speakers

Dr Jessica Barker FSA is a specialist in medieval art, with a particular emphasis on sculpture. She studied at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was subsequently Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined The Courtauld in 2018, after two years as a lecturer in world art at the University of East Anglia.

Dr Ed Krčma is Associate Professor of Art History, in the School of History and Art History at the University of East Anglia. His work is on art since 1945, focusing especially on that made in Europe and the United States in the 1950s and 60s, and on contemporary practice. Ideas of particular interest concern questions about art’s involvement with the conditions of everyday life; the image/text dialogue and how this relates to forms of thinking; and the relationship of contemporary art to medieval and early modern art and thought.

Andrew Bick is a practicing artist represented by Hales Gallery in London and Galerie von Bartha, Basel and also works as a curator with a longstanding academic career focused on Phd supervision and postgraduate teaching. At University of Gloucestershire he is research lead for Art and Design, Reader in Fine Art and supervises a number of PhDs in contemporary art practice.

Dr Nicola Simpson is a Research Fellow at Norwich University of the Arts. Her poetic and curatorial practice explores the influence of Zen and Tantric Mahayana Buddhisms on concrete poetry, kinetic art, participatory art and performance art. These interests inform her research in Creative Health which focus on how innovative and improvisatory creative research methods can explore lived experiences of illness and recovery. 

Image: Dom Sylvester Houédard, freedom song, 1967 @ Lisson Gallery; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.