After an Art PhD: Social Practice Within and Without Institutions
With Anna Colin and Sunshine Wong
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Thursday 12 March 2026, 17:00-19:00
Exhibition Research Lab, John Lennon Art and Design Building L3 5RD (map)
Free and open to all
Booking preferred, via Eventbrite
Join Anna Colin and Sunshine Wong in the first 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.
Anna Colin will share her research into alternative educational spaces and models, from her own experience establishing one, to writing about it for her PhD over a ten-year timeframe in which change felt slow and linear. Reflecting on the speed and wide-ranging forms of change since the pandemic, Anna will then discuss the rapid changes into which arts and educational institutions have been precipitated, and what alternative institutional meanings and models might look like today and tomorrow.
Referencing a recent conversation with a colleague, the title of Sunshine Wong’s talk ‘What They Want Is a Unicorn’ describes the breadth and depth of knowledge expected of freelancing art workers. Using this mythical animal as a starting point, Sunshine will playfully reflect on running a micro art organisation in the current cultural and social landscape.
The event will begin with a short grounding exercise. Refreshments will be available from 20 minutes before the start time. Both speakers will attend in person. 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 Anna Colin is an independent curator, educator, researcher and gardener. She is engaged with critical pedagogy, eco-centric social practice, ecologically inspired organisational models, institutional time and habitability, and social botany. Anna directs the MFA Curating and co-directs the Centre for Art Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was a co-founder and director (2013-21) of Open School East, an independent art school and community space in London and then Margate. She co-curated Chaleur humaine, the 2nd edition of the Dunkirk Art and Industry Triennale (2023-24), on the relationship between energy and the arts over the past five decades. Anna holds a PhD in cultural geography and is the author of Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalization (Villa Arson and Sternberg Press, 2025).
Dr Sunshine Wong is an art worker, researcher and facilitator. She was born and raised in Hong Kong where she worked as an art teacher and later moved to Berlin where she completed her MA at Berlin Universität der Künste while curating live art events around the city. Via affect and queer studies, her 2019 doctoral thesis proposed a socially negotiated art that took place through an embodied relational material. Her current work is based primarily at Bloc Projects in Sheffield, where for the last five years she has been shaping and reshaping a programme that is rooted in equity and critical care. She lives in Sheffield and loves to knit.
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Images (left to right): Anna Colin; Sunshine Wong.