Professor Antonia Payne

Head of Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts

Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts

Contact Details

email: a.payne@worc.ac.uk

tel: 01905 85 5280

 

Qualfications:

BA (Hons) English, Cambridge

Prof Antonia Payne joined the University of Worcester as Head of the Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts in September 2008. From 2005 to 2008 she was Dean of Research at Dartington College of Arts in Devon. She began life as a curator of contemporary art and was Director of Ikon Gallery, Birmingham throughout the 1980s. In the ’90s she worked as a freelance consultant, curator and writer and, alongside, as Tutor in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford. There, she was a founding contributor to The Laboratory research unit, which commissioned new work from artists, drawing on the academic contexts and resources of the University.

Teaching & Research

Contemporary art and associated writing, performance and curatorial practicesSite, space, place and phenomenologyInfrastructures of contemporary art and art education.

Professional Bodies

Publications

The outcomes of Prof Payne’s research take the form of exhibitions, site-based projects and writing. Her 2009 inaugural professorial lecture at Worcester, Vital Signs: art being knowing, drew on thirty years of working with artists to explore how certain experiences of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ are peculiarly available through art’s instigation of bodily, spatial negotiations of situations, contexts and objects; she posited art’s vital capacity to trigger felt experience in a contemporary world of signs in which human beings’ futures have never been more dependent upon their sense of connectedness with each other and with all organic life.

External Responsibilities

As a consultant and researcher, her clients ranged from Arts Council England and the Scottish Arts Council to English Heritage, and museums and galleries from Tate to the John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton. From 2001 to 2005, Prof Payne was Associate Dean (Research & Academic Development) in the School of Art & Design at the University of Wolverhampton. She Chaired the Arts Council’s Live Art Advisory Group from 1989 to 1996 and the Visual Arts & Galleries Association (VAGA) from 1991 to 1995. From 2007 to 2009 she was Convenor of the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review Panel 2: Visual Arts & Media and a member of the AHRC’s Research Committee.