After an Art PhD: Creative Uses of a Creative Work
Free event series
March – April 2026 (dates below)
Exhibition Research Lab, John Lennon Art and Design Building L3 5RD (map)
This series explores different directions taken by art research practitioners in the years immediately after an art PhD. Each event features two speakers who have completed their PhD (either by thesis or by practice) within the past seven years. They include artists, curators, writers, arts administrators and arts organisers.
The speakers differ greatly in their level of continuing engagement with universities since their PhD, from some who now have full-time academic positions to others who have made creative use of their PhD experience through other organisational modes. This range of relationships with academia is intended to counter the commonplace scarcity narrative that says only a very few research practices can continue beyond a PhD, due to the limited number of academic posts available.
To counter this scarcity narrative, this series explores futures after an art PhD both more and less embedded within universities. It foregrounds professional paths that put an art PhD to both institutional and other creative uses, to generate more optimistic alternatives.
At each event we’ll discuss both speakers’ research interests and the specific means they’ve found to enable and sustain those interests. There will be time for discussion, involving attendees, towards wider considerations in sustaining a post-doctoral research practice.
Follow the links below for more information about each event:
Social Practice Within and Without Institutions
17:00-19:00 Thursday 12 March
With Anna Colin and Sunshine Wong
Posthuman Excess
17:00-19:00 Thursday 19 March
With Lucy A. Sames and Jason Waite
Diasporic Dialogues
18:00-20:00 Wednesday 25 March
With Clare Chun-yu Liu and Deniz Sözen
Organising Towards New Intimacies
18:00-20:00 Tuesday 14 April
With Emeri Curd and Cléo Verstrepen
All events are hosted by Jonathan Hoskins, Associate Researcher at the Exhibition Research Lab and organiser of this series.
Images (clockwise from top left): Anna Colin; Lucy A. Sames, ‘Froath on the Sea’, a reading with well water, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2025 (image: Kirsten Cooke); Deniz Sözen; Emeri Curd (image: Carl Davies); Cléo Verstrepen; Clare Chun-yu Liu; Jason Waite; Sunshine Wong.