After an Art PhD: Diasporic Dialogues
With Clare Chun-yu Liu and Deniz Sözen
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Wednesday 25 March 2026, 18:00-20:00
Exhibition Research Lab, John Lennon Art and Design Building L3 5RD (map)
Free and open to all
Booking preferred, via Eventbrite
Join Clare Chun-yu Liu and Deniz Sözen for the third in a series of four events, each exploring the work of two art research practitioners with related interests who have completed doctoral study in recent years, to examine the possibilities and challenges of practice after an art PhD.
Clare Chun-yu Liu will talk about her practice-based fine art research on cross-cultural historiography and her trajectory as an artist and researcher since completing her PhD, including her research branching out to art historical publishing, Postdoc and research fellowships abroad, her filmmaking practice and curating.
Deniz Sözen’s presentation will trace her journey as an artist-researcher undertaking a practice-based PhD. Sharing examples from her research, she will shed light on her career trajectory before and after the completion of her PhD, reflecting on some of the unique potentials and challenges of specialising in practice-based research.
The event will begin with a short grounding exercise. Refreshments will be available from 20 minutes before the start time. Clare Chun-yu Liu will attend in person; Deniz Sözen will attend online. The event is hosted by Jonathan Hoskins, Associate Researcher at the Exhibition Research Lab and organiser of this series.
Find more here about the whole series ‘After an Art PhD: Creative Uses of a Creative Work’.
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Speaker biographies
Dr Clare Chun-yu Liu is an artist, curator and academic. She is currently Guest Curator at Sine Screen, London, and Research Associate at Manchester School of Art, and was Research Fellow at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin, Postdoctoral Artist Fellow at Brno University of Technology and Visiting Researcher at ARCHIVO. Informed by her familial roots in Taiwan, China and Indonesia, Clare’s practice-based fine art research centres on the Chinese diaspora and the fluidity of identity, with a focus on lived experience and oral history. Recently she has been re-interpreting the European cultural heritage of chinoiserie from a cross-cultural and postcolonial perspective. Clare’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally, including at the ICA in London, EXiS (Experimental Film and Video Festival, Seoul), Image Forum Festival in Japan, Kasseler Dokfest, Goethe-Institut Lisbon and Minsheng Art Museum in Beijing.
Dr Deniz Sözen is a visual artist, researcher and lecturer in History of Art at the University of Birmingham. Of mixed Turkish Austrian heritage, she specialises in contemporary art and decolonial methodologies in the context of globalisation and diasporic art. Recent publications include contributions to The Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History (2024) and the Third Text special issue ‘Polyphony: Method, Voice, Archive’ (2024). In 2022 she received an Arts Council England grant to curate Maker Unknown, a multilingual digital archival exhibition exploring gaps in the categorisation and provenance of non-European artefacts in the Camberwell ILEA collection. Her practice-based PhD (‘The Art of Un-belonging’) in Visual Arts and Media at the University of Westminster, London was supported by the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) Doctoral Research Scholarship (2014-17). Her video installation Surya Namaz was nominated for a Best Practice Award by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies in 2019.
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Images (left to right): Deniz Sözen; Clare Chun-yu Liu.