As a public programme of UAL funded by Arts Council England, we are not an independent organisation and have no board. Instead, we have a team of senior advisors from arts and culture to help shape our programme.

Our current advisors are:

Stephen Beddoe

Stephen is Director of External Relations at Central Saint Martins, part of UAL, Europe’s largest specialist institution for art, design and communications. He was Director of Careers and Employability at UAL until 2015, and the founding Director of Artquest. Stephen studied fine art at The Glasgow School of Art, and has exhibited work nationally and internationally. He has curated projects in many galleries and public spaces in the UK and beyond. From 1995 to 1997 he was Visual Arts and Crafts Officer for London Arts Board (now Arts Council England) and from 1997 to 2001 was Commissions Manager for Modus Operandi Art Consultants, commissioning major public art projects internationally. Stephen joined University of the Arts London in 2001 to develop and launch Artquest. From 2005-2009 Stephen was also a Specialist Advisor (Visual Arts) to the Scottish Arts Council and is currently a Trustee of London Print Studio. Stephen is also a Harkness Fellow (the UK’s reciprocal Rhodes Scholarship) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).

Helen Carnac

Helen was awarded a Cultural Leadership fellowship in the crafts in 2009 in order to develop ideas about how the crafts are communicated. In 2006 she was co-chair for the Association for Contemporary Jewellery’s conference Carry the Can and is actively involved in developing dialogue within the crafts having developed numerous talks and events for makers over the past six years. She curated our Craft Rally, held in London in 2010, and the national touring exhibition Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution (2009-2011).  Her work is held in both national and international collections. Helen relocated out of London during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Youngsook Choi

Youngsook Choi is an artist and researcher with a PhD in human geography. She often develops narratives of non-fictional fantasy – a mixture of research evidence, folk tales, mythologies and performative instructions for audience participation. Since 2019, Youngsook has developed a series of performances and installations that explores the concept of political spirituality by experimenting with intimate aesthetics of solidarity actions and collective healing. Her works have been supported by Arts Catalyst, Barbican, Coventry Biennial, FACT Liverpool, Heart of Glass, Liverpool Biennial, Milton Keynes Arts Centre and MK Islamic Art Heritage and Culture. Youngsook is a co-initiator of Decolonising Botany Working Group and part of Have You Eaten Yet? collective.

Teresa Cisneros

Teresa Cisneros is a Chicana (Mexican-American) cultural producer. She has worked as a curator, art educator and arts manager, including as curatorial fellow at The Showroom, InIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts), Tate Modern, 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, Nottingham Contemporary and at the Wellcome Collection. With artist Barby Asante, Cisneros initiated sorryyoufeeluncomfortable a collective united by a desire to challenge and critique our racist, patriarchal, heteronormative and colonial society. She co-founded the independent curatorial collective agency for agency in 2015, and in 2018 began b. dewitt gallery, a responsive space that works alongside and in conversation with artists whose practice engages with social and political considerations, with cultural producer Ashleigh Barice. Teresa’s projects and work explore the politics of identity, history and contemporary art practices. She currently works as Senior Practice Manager: Culture Equity Diversity Inclusion at the Wellcome Trust.

Mary Evans

Mary Evans is an artist with a national and international reputation. Having studied at Goldsmiths and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Evans’s practice is centred on the social, political, geographical, and historical frameworks of Diaspora, migration, global mobility and exchange. This cross-cultural discourse is paralleled by a secondary discourse that links methods of image production, ’fine art’ and ‘craft’, decoration, and ornament. Appointed in 2023 as the Director of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, Evans was previously the BA Fine Art course leader at Chelsea College of Arts. As an educator, Evans is invested in challenging barriers to education and widening access to the arts.

Rona Lee

Rona Lee is a retired Professor of Fine Art at University of Northumbria at Newcastle and an artist working across critically engaged fine art practices. Working in an eclectic and ‘expanded’ manner, combining performance, photography, sculpture and video, Rona operates across gallery and non-gallery settings. Rooted in feminist, performative and conceptual practices, her work engages with questions of subjectivity and alteriety. Born by the sea, a number projects have adopted water as a focus, paralleling a wider set of interests in the fluid / volatile as a philosophical, cultural and material category. She is interested in the ways in which art making might engender dialogue among different audiences and communities of interest, both specialist and amateur, prompting reflection on existing ways of thinking and doing, while pointing towards new models of relating.

Helen Nisbet

Helen is a curator working on independent and partnership projects across the UK and internationally, currently Artistic Director for Art Night. She was Artist Advisor on Syllabus IV with Wysing Arts Centre, S1 Art Space, iniva, Studio Voltaire, Spike Island and East Side Projects and a Visiting Lecturer at the RCA. She is a member of the Arts Council Collection’s Acquisitions Committee and a board member for a-n. Previously she was Curatorial Fellow at Cubitt Gallery from 2017 to 2018 and has worked with organisations including Open Source, Creative Time, the Contemporary Art Society and the Arts Council Collection where she organised a series of 8 commissions to celebrate the collection’s 70th anniversary in 2016.

Evelyn Wilson

Evelyn Wilson is Co-Director of National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange (NCACE) and Founder Director of The Culture Capital Exchange (TCCE). Her work brings together higher education researchers with practitioners in the cultural and creative sectors around areas of common interest. Through her work at TCCE, she co-conceived and was Co-Investigator of the Boosting Resilience programme and led on the conception and delivery of many key elements of Creativeworks London Knowledge Exchange Programme. She has extensive experience as a cultural producer and curator, working since the early 1990’s in third cinema, photography and the digital arts. She has an MA in Geosociology from Goldsmiths and a degree in Communications Studies at Ulster University.

Shelagh Wright

Shelagh is engaged with a diverse range of people and projects around the world on cultural and creative economy policy and sustainable practice. She has worked extensively with government and the public, charitable and private sectors on creativity, social enterprise, investment and innovation agendas and is an associate of the think tank Demos. Shelagh has led programmes of work with the British Council, Creative and Cultural Skills, Screen England, Arts Council England, Creative Partnerships, was a contributor to the Creative Britain strategy, and a member of the EU Expert Working Group on the Creative Industries.  She is also a Director of ThreeJohnsandShelagh (with John Holden, John Kieffer and John Newbigin), an associate of the Culture+Conflict initiative and a director of missions models money.

Former members of the Advisory Group include Jeff Zie, Mark Dunhill, Gilane Tawadros, Amanda King, Mark Sealy MBE, Sarah Rowles and Layla Curtis.