Research staff

Chelsea College of Arts researchers and their areas of art and design expertise.

Dr Danah Abdulla

Reader in Anti/Post/Decolonial Histories, Theories, Practices and Praxes

• Design cultures (with a particular focus on the Arab region).
• Decolonising design and politics of design.
• Design education and critical pedagogy.
• New design narratives and practices pushing disciplinary boundaries.

Claire Anderson

Course Leader - Graduate Diploma Textile Design

• Colour and textiles.
• Democratised textile technologies.
• Responsible textile and material futures.

Dr Dave Beech

Reader in Art and Marxism

• Art, capitalism and Marxism.
• Value theory, labour and automation.
• Public sphere and participation.
• Institutional critique and the history of art’s institutions.

Professor Sonia Boyce

Chair of Black Art and Design

• Art as social practice, fine art practice and drawing.

Dr Marsha Bradfield

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Archiving and contextualising interdisciplinary practice.
• Economies and ecologies of collaborative cultural production.
• Incidentality, the Artist Placement Group and post-artistic practice.
• Intercultural practices and life-long/life-wide learning.
• Interdependence, including personal and professional hyphenation.

Jo Bruton

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Fine art.
• Painting.
• Gender.
• Abstraction.
• Installation.

Dr Mohini Chandra

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Decolonisation.
• Globalisation.
• Empire and place.
• Postcolonial diaspora experience.
• Photography, memory and the archive.
• Moving image and installation practice.
• Marine archaeology and shipwrecks.

Dr Andrew Chesher

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• History and criticism of post-war, neo-avant-garde and contemporary art in Europe and North America; phenomenology; deconstruction; social theories of meaning, film and documentary; photography.

Dr Jason Cleverly

Course Leader - BA Product and Furniture Design

• Art and science.
• Craft.
• Design ethnography.
• Design theory.
• Museum interpretation.

Professor Paul Coldwell

Professor of Fine Art Printmaking

• Collections and archives.
• Printmaking - new and old technologies.
• Fine art.

David Cross

Reader in Fine Art

• Fine art, context specific sculptural installation and photography.

Dr Matthew Crowley

Senior Lecturer in Textile Design

• Masculinities (gender studies).
• British cultural history / cultural studies.
• Class (representations).

Professor Neil Cummings

Professor of Fine Art

• Political economy of art.
• Critical practice.
• Activism.
• Resilience.

Jeffrey Dennis

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Fine art, painting, drawing, meaning and process in contemporary painting.

Sarah Dobai

Reader in Photography, Text and Film-based Practice

• Contemporary photography and moving image practices.
• Representation and the use of text / narrative in contemporary fine art practice and relation to historical works of literature, cinema and photography.

Bernice Donszelmann

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Architecture and spatial practice.
• Installation.
• Fine art.

Professor Becky Earley

Professor of Circular Design Futures

• Sustainable and circular design practice.
• Textiles for fashion, interiors and automotive.
• New materials, applications and business models.
• Design-driven and social research methods for collaborations.

Ben Fitton

Course Leader - BA Fine Art

• Site specificity.
• Politics of spectatorship.
• Public address.
• Uncertainty and indeterminacy.
• Appropriation, substitution and mimicry.
• Language, consciousness and sculpture.

Dr Edwina Fitzpatrick

Research Degrees Coordinator

• Sited artwork and mutable sculpture, living environment, mutability and change.

Adrian Friend

Programme Director - Material and Spatial Practices

• Citizen builder.
• Robotic craft.
• Collaborative robotics.
• 3D-printed earth-based material research.
• Museology.

Professor Kate Goldsworthy

Professor of Circular Design and Innovation

• Circular and sustainable textile design practice.
• Design-led material innovation.
• New textile production and finishing technologies.
• Multi-disciplinary methodologies.

Professor Paul Goodwin

Chair of Contemporary Art and Urbanism

• Theory and practice of the curatorial, especially in relation to the global and transnational.
• African and diaspora contemporary art and visual cultures.

Lucy Gunning

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Site, context, space.
• Performativity.
• Installation / event.

Dr Peter Hall

Reader in Graphic Design

• Mapping and visualisation as critical and participatory practices.

Dr Rosie Hornbuckle

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Complex Design Collaborations

• Complex design collaborations.
• Systemic design.
• Multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral research.
• Design methodologies.
• Circular design.
• Sustainable design.
• Design for net zero.
• Materials design.
• Translational design.

Dr Galia Kollectiv

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Art and Politics.
• Ideology.
• Irony and Overidentification.
• Performance, Film and Video.
• Immaterial Labour.
• Curating.
• Installation
• Music.
• Art Writing.

Professor Jo Melvin

Professor of Fine Art and Feminisms

• Archives, embodiment, oral histories and conceptual art practices.
• Exhibition curation as praxis; devising new research methodologies.

David Musgrave

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Practice and theory of image making.
• Narrative fiction.
• Entanglement of art, technology and science.
• Social and artistic impact of Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Malcolm Quinn

Professor of Cultural and Political History and Associate Dean of Research

• Taste, aesthetics and design.
• Utilitarianism and aesthetics.

Professor Daniel Sturgis

Professor of Painting

• Fine art painting, curation, the histories of abstraction, modernism and the baroque.

Dr Mo Throp

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

• Sexuality, gender and intersectionality.
• Performativity, trauma.

Professor Carol Tulloch

Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism

• Dress and textiles associated with the African diaspora, material and visual culture, writing and curating.

Dr Maria Walsh

Reader in Artists Moving Image

• Artists' moving image practices, especially in relation to subjectivity, the body, performativity and marginality.
• Psychoanalytic discourse as a model for auto-fiction, especially in moving image practices.

Dr Ken Wilder

Reader in Spatial Design

• Beholding, aesthetics and situated art.
• Architectural / spatial design practices and aesthetics.