Kleinwort Hambros emerging artist prize

The Kleinwort Hambros Emerging Artist Prize was originally launched in 2019 to reward the work of one contemporary artist selected from across the UK. In 2021, in recognition of the challenging economic and social environment, as well as acknowledging the wealth of talent in the UK, Kleinwort Hambros decided to reward three artists, rather than one. 

The award seeks to acknowledge and celebrate artists who have been active on the art scene and whose career would benefit from the visibility and financial support provided by the Prize. The candidates are British nationals or UK based, 35 years or under, and with a body of work that shows significant originality and coherence.

The 15 candidates are nominated by five talented curators from institutions across the UK. After being short-listed, the artists are judged by a prestigious panel of experts from the Arts industry – in previous years the panel was comprised of Aurélie Deplus, Andrew Nairne, Sarah Brown and Melanie Keen. The jury selects the three winners, who are then announced in the Spring at our Emerging Artists Awards event.

This award is the only art prize from a private bank to recognise emerging contemporary artists from across the UK. 

This initiative complements our nationwide approach to serving clients, with an active presence in key regions, including London, Newbury, Cambridge, Leeds and Edinburgh. It also reinforces our vision to be a leading responsible bank for client service and expertise, driven by creativity and innovation.

This award is the only art prize from a private bank to recognise emerging contemporary artists from across the UK. It complements our nationwide approach to serving clients. It also reinforces our position as a forward-thinking bank, driven by creativity and innovation.

The 15 short-listed artists will be judged by a prestigious panel comprising Fiona Bradley, Aurélie Deplus, Andrew Nairne, Sarah Brown and Melanie Keen

The jury will choose the three winners, who will then be announced in April.

Meet the winners (2021)

Ayo Akingbade
Ayo Akingbade
Olu Ogunnaike
Olu Ogunnaike
Shawanda Corbett
Shawanda Corbett
Ayo Akingbade
Ayo Akingbade

Born in London, 1994. Lives and works in London

Ayo Akingbade is an artist, director and writer from London. She works predominantly with moving image, addressing notions of urbanism, power and stance. She has exhibited and screened widely, including presentations at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2020); ‘This is England’, Somerset House Studios, London (2019); ‘Building Space’, South London Gallery (2019); ‘In formation’, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, (2018); and ‘Imagination Is Power: Be Realistic, Ask the Impossible’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, (2018); as well as Birkbeck University (2020), and Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2020) amongst others.

Akingbade graduated with a BA in Film Practice from London College of Communication and is due to graduate with a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2021.

Forthcoming exhibitions include: ‘A Glittering City’, Whitechapel Gallery (2021), ‘An Infinity of Traces’ Lisson Gallery (2021) and ‘No News Today’, Coventry Biennial (2021).

Image credits :
Scott Gallagher

Olu Ogunnaike
Olu Ogunnaike

Born in London, 1986. Lives and works in London.

Taking trees as repositories of memory within the places and communities in which they grow, Olu cites wood as a marker of possible encounters: between past and present; between people and the spaces they inhabit. He is interested in the parallels that can be drawn between humans and trees, tracing the moment a tree is uprooted from one geographical setting and placed in another, where it might be transformed. This story – of the composite and accumulative nature of our identities– is inextricably linked to community, labour and the transaction of exchange.

Beyond a human perspective of linear time, trees have offered Olu a route to looking at questions of provenance and history that surpass current ideas around recolonising history and human one way narratives.                       
            
Forthcoming projects include the Royal Academy of Arts Degree Show, as well as exhibitions with Timothy Taylor, New York, the Museum Folkwang, Essen and the Halle Für Kunst Steiermark, Graz.

Olu obtained a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy, London, in 2020 and a BA Hons in Fine Art Critical Practice from the University of Brighton in 2013.

Image credits
Elizabeth Presland

Shawanda Corbett
Shawanda Corbett

Born in New York, 1989. Lives and works in Oxford.

Shawanda Corbett’s studio practice background is in ceramics (vessel making). The craft principles, fundamentals and discipline in ceramics are applied to other mediums, such as dance theatre production (live performance and film performance). This technique is called craft theory. Currently, she is researching how Artificial Intelligence can facilitate craft theory in her studio practice.

Corbett is currently pursuing her practice-led doctoral degree in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art and Wadham College, University of Oxford. Her research redefines Donna Haraway's cyborg theory, or the cybernetic organism, as anything mechanical that enhances an individual's life. The research also focuses on the relationship between human beings and technology created with Artificial Intelligence. This is approached through the science fiction genre in film and literature but from a perspective of a differently abled-body (cyborg) woman of colour, so this includes texts, film (visual representation), music in African American history/African history and Artificial Intelligence history.

Her first solo exhibition, Neighbourhood Garden, was held at the Corvi-Mora Gallery in London (2020). She described the exhibit as a revisit of her family’s history as southern African Americans living between Mississippi and New York. The work challenged the history of African American tropes without reducing her subjects to their physical bodies by focusing on the individual’s personality, daily activity or place of residence.

Performances include "breathe." at the NOW Gallery, London, in 2020. “Blackbird in Mississippi”, for COS x Serpentine Park Nights at the Serpentine Galleries in 2019 and  “haar wese” presented at the University of Oxford.

Meet the artists (2021)

Adam Farah / free.yard
Adam Farah / free.yard
Anya Paintsil
Anya Paintsil
Ashley Holmes
Ashley Holmes
Beth Kettel
Beth Kettel
Jake Grewal
Jake Grewal
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
Libita Sibungu
Libita Sibungu
Phoebe Davies
Phoebe Davies
Rae-Yen Song
Rae-Yen Song
Rebecca Jagoe
Rebecca Jagoe
Renèe Helèna Browne
Renèe Helèna Browne
Tako Taal
Tako Taal
Adam Farah / free.yard
Adam Farah / free.yard

Born 1991 in London. Lives and works in London.

Adam Farah is an artist and composer born-n-raised in London and is a Capricorn Sun, Cancer Rising, Leo Moon. They also practice under and within the name free.yard – an ongoing situational and unstable project set up to engage with and merge curatorial, research, artistic and equitable communal practices; with a focus on the ever expansive and nuanced creative endeavors and potentials that emerge from endz*. free.yard casts a side-eye onto the oppressive and supremacist structures upheld within the complacent and performative liberal bubbles of the artworld/s, and in the long term desires to create collaborative moments for artists to connect, manifest and exhale under such weight.

Up-coming project in 2021 include ‘London’s Kitchen’ a commission for Panel, UK, as well as a residency with Metroland Studio, London.

*endz is a slang term originating in London meaning neighbourhood, but carries its own contextual nuances, mainly referring to working class communities with larger ethnic-minority populations. 

Anya Paintsil
Anya Paintsil

Born in Wrexham, Wales, 1993. Lives and works in Chester.

Anya Paintsil is a North West based textile artist of Welsh and Ghanaian descent. Combining traditional hand rug making techniques with afro hair styling methods, Paintsil seeks to promote artistic practices historically devalued due to their associations with femininity and other marginalised groups. 

Paintsil’s work is largely autobiographical, with her body of work consisting of self-portraits and portraits of her family, to communicate her experiences growing up in North Wales, as well as frequently focusing on past traumas, mental health and her experiences as a woman on the autism spectrum.

Anya’s work will be included in group shows at The Craft Council Gallery, London; The Whitworth, Manchester; Glynn Vivan, Swansea; and to be announced shows in the USA. Past exhibitions include a solo presentation at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House, London; Open Studio at Manchester School Of Art, (2020); Useful Culture, Manchester Art Gallery,Manchester, (2019) 

Anya is a 2020 graduate of The Manchester School of Art.

Image credits :
Victoria Moyosola

Ashley Holmes
Ashley Holmes

Born in Luton, 1990. Lives and works in Sheffield

Ashley Holmes is a multidisciplinary artist & DJ based in Sheffield working across sound, video, radio broadcasts & performance. His practice is informed by ideas of ancestral transmission, property, access & citizenship to explore the histories of resistance & anti-colonial resilience embedded in Black musical & sound-based practices.

Since early 2019 he has facilitated Open Deck - a series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen & discuss relationships to music & oral histories. He also hosts Tough Matter, a radio programme broadcast monthly on NTS Radio. 

He has exhibited internationally, with recent presentations including; A Free Moment, solo exhibition curated by Christina Gigliotti at Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, (2020); away, completely: denigrate, group exhibition curated by Languid Hands at Narrative Projects, London (2020); Double 6, collaborative performance with R.I.P. Germain commissioned by Poor Image Projects at the former Court Room of Leeds Town Hall, Leeds (2019); Survey, group exhibition by Jerwood Arts, London. 

He is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and was awarded a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. Holmes is currently developing a new body of work for 2021 as part of the Radio Arts Catalyst Residency programme. 

Image credits :
Jules Lister courtesy of Poor Image Projects Index Festival

Beth Kettel
Beth Kettel

Born in Leicester, 1988. Based in Nottingham.
 
Beth Kettel works with costume, sound, text, object, moving image and performance. With an interest in language and meaning-making through the five semiotic systems: linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial. Usually creating multilayered performance and video installations that borrow symbolic, structural and stylistic devices from elsewhere, i.e. music videos and games, which set up imagined arenas for characters, tones, multiple voices and diverse interests to interconnect. 
 
Recent work has explored movement of meaning through mediums, physical and psychological experience, interrelationships, verbal and nonverbal communication between living organisms with explorations into consciousness and mental health of different species. Often working with people from other fields, past works have involved: choirs, sports teams, geologists, sound engineers, dancers and musicians.
 
Recent commissions include: Baseline Drift,a performance part of Art Night, produced by Forma (2019); Artand Screen Network, ICA in partnership with Phoenix, Leicester (2018). Solo exhibitions include: The Mist of a Pessimist, ZC: Invites, London (2017); Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2016); Two Queens, Leicester (2016); Hutt, Nottingham (2016). 
 
Kettel received a first class BA hons in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University (2013) and was a participant in Syllabus IV (2019), an alternative learning programme delivered by seven UK arts organisations. She has delivered artist talks and workshops around the UK and Internationally including at NonSpace, Aarhus; Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and Nottingham Contemporary and has been awarded Arts Council England, London Borough of Culture and European Capital of Culture funding.

Image credits
Beth Kettel portrait in studio at Primary studios, photograph: Reece Straw

Jake Grewal
Jake Grewal

Born in London, 1994. Lives and works in London.

Grewal’s work blends the language of Romanticism with his South Asian heritage to express autobiographical experiences. Themes of identity, love, loss, violence and adolescence are explored through a queer gaze, creating a dream-like reality based in nature.*  

“As I paint I place equal importance on the figure as I do the landscape. I try to treat both equally and as abstractly as possible, blurring the lines between where one ends and the other begins. I play within the figure and outside of the figure creating a dialogue between the two so they begin to merge. A sharing of atmosphere where one is penetrating the other. This can open up ambiguity within the work and motifs can be seen fluidly. In this sense imagination is crucial in creating and reading the work. A figure can be a tree and a tree can be a figure, they are one in the same. I remember being a child and this kind of thinking would come naturally. Imagination would allow reality to turn into something other almost instantaneously. I’m interested by a duplicity and plurality within the work.”

Recent group shows include Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2020, South London Gallery; Deity, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh; Everyday is Sunday, UTA Artists Space, Beverly Hills and No Time Like The Present, Public Gallery, London.

Jake won both the Cass Art Award and Woon Foundation Prize Judge's Discretionary Award in 2016. In 2020 he participated in the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Drawing Marathon residency.

Jake Grewal graduated from The University of Brighton with a first class honors in Fine Art degree in 2016.

*www.royaldrawingschool.org

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

Born in Gutu, Zimbabwe, 1993. Lives and works in London.

Born in Gutu, Zimbabwe in 1993, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami currently lives and works in the UK and is completing an MFA at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University. In 2016, the same year she graduated from Wimbledon College of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, she was awarded the Clyde & Co. Award and the Young Achiever of the Year Award at the Zimbabwean International Women’s Awards, as well as being shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries. In 2017, Tyburn Gallery, London, held a solo exhibition of Hwami’s work entitled If You Keep Going South You’ll Meet Yourself. In 2019, Hwami presented work at the 58th Venice Biennale as part of the Zimbabwe Pavilion, the youngest artist to participate in the Biennale. Also in 2019, Hwami mounted her first institutional solo exhibition, (15,952km) via Trans–Sahara Hwy N1 at Gasworks, London.
 
Recent group exhibitions include Les Ateliers de Rennes – Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Rennes, France (2018); Five Bhobh – Painting at the End of an Era, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2018);Vos désirs sont les nôtres, Triangle France, Marseille, France (2018);Talisman in the Age of Difference,Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2018); Ladies by Ladies, Espace Art Absolument, Paris, France (2018); Afriques: artistes d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, Fondation Clément, Martinique (2018); Discoloured Margins, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe (2017); and I SEE YOU, Victoria Miro, London, UK (2020).
 
Forthcoming group exhibitions include The Power of My Hands, curated by Suzanna Sousa and Odile Burluraux, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (opening January 2021) and Ubuntu: A Lucid Dream, curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (opening June 2021).

Image credits
Jo Metson Scott

Libita Sibungu
Libita Sibungu

Born in Cornwall, late 1980's. Lives and works between Bristol, UK and Windhoek, Namibia.

Libita Sibungu’s solo and collaborative projects explore the political and spiritual relationships between the landscape and the body - told through personal and collective histories connecting diasporic legacies. Research is shared through embodied acts of digging; in earth, in records - revealing lost, and buried testimonies emerging out of fugitive experiences. Installations, performance, print, text and sound, help bring to life ongoing conversations surrounding the possibilities of a living archive.

Projects of note have been presented with; ​Gasworks, Somerset House,​ ​Spike Island, (all UK) and Cabaret Voltaire, Switzerland, (2019); Whitstable Biennale; Eastside Projects, (all UK) and Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2018); South London Gallery, UK, and Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, Italy (2017). 

Forthcoming projects include participation in Sonsbeek,​ ​​Force Times Distance On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies,​ Arnhem, Netherlands, and Agitation Co-op​, ​Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin.

Phoebe Davies
Phoebe Davies

Born in Cardiff, Wales, 1985. Lives and works between London and South Wales.

Phoebe Davies is a Welsh artist and researcher, based between Somerset House Studios in London and Bridgend in South Wales.

Her practice spans print, installation, video, and sound, often investigating people’s perceptions of their social framing, personal narratives and collaborative models of working. Recent projects have led her to work with sex educators, secondary school students, elderly residents in care homes, sports teams and DJs as well as art spaces and institutions, including; Festival of Voice, Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff), Tate Modern (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), Eastside Projects (Birmingham), Praksis (Oslo, Norway), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, USA), SA-UK Seasons (Johannesburg, ZA).

Alongside her studio practice, she has an on-going collaboration with choreographer Nandi Bhebhe, directing work together as Bhebhe&Davies. Peer learning and knowledge sharing are core to her work ethic; she regularly facilitates research groups and lectures at universities, summer schools and peer networking including Syllabus III, London College
of Communication, Sheffield Hallam University and The Royal College of Art.     

She was a recipient of the British Council Social Practice Fellowship Award (2015), Inaugural Jerwood New Work Fund (2019), and PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab Residency (2019).

Rae-Yen Song
Rae-Yen Song

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1993. Lives and works in Glasgow.

I currently think of my practice as a long-term exploration of self-mythologising as a survival tactic. My work explores the position of Other within our tangled reality, and speaks broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, survival and what it means to belong – or not. It finds form via drawing, sculpture, costume, props, video, animation, family collaboration, online content and performative actions in public. Increasingly, any or all of these elements coalesce as installations which form coherent, singular environments.

In 2021, exhibitions and artworks will include: a LUX Scotland moving image commission for the BBC; a commission for Dislocations at the Hunterian Gallery, University of Glasgow; Fabric of Society, a group show supported by Glasgow International; and a major solo show at Dundee Contemporary Arts.

Recent exhibitions and residencies include: Umay-may songuuU, a solo show at CFCCA, Manchester (2020); Talbot Rice Residents, a two-year residency supported by Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh (2019-21); Summer Residency, Hospitalfield, Arbroath (2019); and Survey, Jerwood Arts, London (2018).

Image credits
Michael Barr

Rebecca Jagoe
Rebecca Jagoe

Born in Cambridge, 1988. Lives and works in Monmouth, Wales.

Rebecca Jagoe describes themself as a queer, crip, neurodiverse artist, and a non binary femme. Their work is a material memoir which examines how their own experiences of illness and gender, how their identity itself, is informed by specific Western cultural narratives. They explore how within European culture, the Feminine is constructed at the meeting point of medical rhetoric and the aesthetics of mainstream fashion. Rebecca is an Irish artist who has lived in England for most of their life, and last year they permanently moved out of London to South Wales.

Rebecca has performed widely, including recent projects such ‘As if.’ at the CCA Gallery, Goldsmiths, London; Florilege, a collaborative project, exhibition and performance with Nils Alix Tabeling, at Jupiter Woods and Overnight Relief, Kelder Projects, London, in 2019.

Recent residencies and grants include a 2021-22 g39 Fellowship at the g39 Gallery, Cardiff; Freelands Foundation Emergency Grant and a residency with the Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge.

Forthcoming projects include‘‘A Sickness, a Ston’, an online performance for Site Gallery, Sheffield as well as a group show, ‘Drawing after Hans Bellmer’, at the Drawing Room London.

Rebecca Jagoe has an MA in Sculpture from the RCA, London, as well as a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Practice from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Renèe Helèna Browne
Renèe Helèna Browne

Born in Donegal, Ireland, in 1992. Lives and works in Glasgow.

Renèe Helèna Browne uses strategies of deconstruction to ask, when considered in relation to trans history and memory, if ‘the document’, a stand-in for artefact, proof of origin and therefore traditional value, can be reconsidered. And what new forms of legacy, a system of status and authenticity, can be founded. They make work in order to expand this study through a feminist epistemological lens. 
 
They do this by exploring how gender is perceived via the prisms of fiction and embodied feeling. They are specifically interested in the biopolitical power of deviant bodies as alternative strategies to being in the world. Their practice manifests through long term research periods in the form of learning, talking, filming and writing, and is followed by the production of essay films, vocal soundscapes and angsty drawings.
 
Browne received their MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2019. They are 2021-2023 Talbot Rice Resident Artist with ECA at the University of Edinburgh and commissioned by the Project Arts Centre (Dublin) in 2021. 

Tako Taal
Tako Taal

Born in Wales, 1989. Lives and works in Glasgow

Tako Taal is an artist and programmer living in Glasgow. At stake in her artistic practice are the psychic structures of colonial relations and the question of how vivid they remain in the present. 

Tako graduated in 2015 from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen with BA hons in Contemporary Art Practice. She was a 2019 RAW Academy fellow at RAW Material Company, Dakar, and a Committee Member at Market Gallery, Glasgow, 2016-18. In 2020 her work was presented at Glasgow Short Film Festival, Tramway, Glasgow, and Glasgow Women’s Library. 

She is shortlisted for the 2021 Margaret Tait Award and is a co-programmer for GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW, LUX Scotland’s artists’ moving image festival.

Image credits
Matthew Arthur Williams

Meet our jury

Fiona Bradley
DirectorFruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh
Fiona Bradley
Aurelie Deplus
Head of Contemporary Art Collection and SponsorshipSociété Générale, Paris
Aurelie Deplus
Andrew Nairne
DirectorKettle's Yard, Cambridge
Andrew Nairne
Melanie Keen
DirectorWellcome Collection
Melanie Keen
Sarah Brown
Principal KeeperLeeds Art Gallery
Sarah Brown
Fiona Bradley
Fiona Bradley
Director
Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh

https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/

Fiona Bradley has an MA in Art History from Cambridge University and an MA and PhD from the Courtauld Institute London. She started her curatorial career at Tate Liverpool and the Hayward Gallery, London, and has been Director of The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh since 2003. Fiona has curated exhibitions and produced publications with numerous important Scottish and international artists. In 2011 she commissioned Martin Creed’s award-winning Work 1059, and was the curator for Scotland’s contribution to the Venice Biennale with an exhibition of the work of Karla Black.

Fiona has been a member of different juries such as the Turner Prize and the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2007. Fiona currently sits on the Imperial War Museum’s Contemporary Commissioning Committee, the Freelands Foundation Advisory Committee, and is a member of the Selection Committee for the British Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennale. Fiona was awarded an OBE for services to the arts in 2018.

Aurelie Deplus
Aurelie Deplus
Head of Contemporary Art Collection and Sponsorship
Société Générale, Paris

https://www.societegenerale.com/en/patronage-and-sponsorhip/supporting-the-arts-and-music/contemporary-art

Aurelie Deplus has been responsible for Public Relations since 2017, and for the Contemporary Art Collection and Cultural Projects since 2013, for the Societe Generale Group

Previously, Aurelie was in charge of communication for the Financing Division of Corporate and Investment Banking at Societe Generale, a position she held since January 2008. She began her career in 1993 as a financial analyst at HSBC, then moved to Crédit Lyonnais and Close Brothers. She joined Societe Generale’s Corporate and Investment Banking in 2001 as an M&A and Corporate Financial Analyst and then on Financial Institutions. 

Aurelie Deplus is a graduate of the Institut Supérieur de Commerce, the Société Française des Analystes Financiers and received a Master of Arts at Christie’s.

Andrew Nairne
Andrew Nairne
Director
Kettle's Yard, Cambridge

https://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/

Andrew Nairne has been Director of Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, since 2011.He is a former Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts and Modern Art Oxford. He has worked with numerous UK and international artists. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a curator in Glasgow, he organised exhibitions with artists from Eastern Europe and supported the rise of a new generation of British artists.

Andrew led the £11 million re-development of Kettle’s Yard, which reopened in February
2018. Recent exhibitions have included Actions. The image of the world can be different,
Antony Gormley SUBJECT and Julie Mehretu: Drawings and Monotypes.

Melanie Keen
Melanie Keen
Director
Wellcome Collection

https://wellcomecollection.org/

Melanie Keen is Director of the Wellcome Collection, a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we think and feel about health. Opened in 2007, and inspired by the medical objects collected by Henry Wellcome, it connects science, medicine, life and art.                          

Prior to joining the Wellcome Collection     ,Melanie was Director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), an evolving, radical visual arts organisation dedicated to developing an artistic programme that reflects on the social and political impact of globalisation. Previous to this Melanie was a senior manager at Arts Council England. She has participated in international conferences including the March Meeting 2016, Sharjah, Curating the International Diaspora, Asia Culture Centre and ICF, South Korea. Melanie acts as Independent Advisor to the Government Art Collection, sits on the British Council’s Visual Arts Advisory Group and in 2018 participated in the Mayor of London’s Suffrage Commission Group. She is also part of the Leonardo Group for Science Gallery, London.

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
Principal Keeper
Leeds Art Gallery

https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/leeds-art-gallery/

Sarah Brown has led Leeds Art Gallery as Principal Keeper overseeing all aspects of the artistic programme and was responsible for the capital refurbishment leading the reopening of Leeds Art Gallery in 2017. As one of the founding members of Yorkshire Sculpture International she has contributed to establishing the major festival celebrating the history, presentation and commissioning of sculpture launching in 2019. 

In 2019 she was a judge for the Paul Hamlyn Award and the Hepworth Sculpture Prize and has chaired the Northern Art Prize celebrating artists living and working in the North. She has curated numerous exhibitions, working with UK and international artists, commissioning new work and is responsible for major acquisitions for one of the strongest collections of sculpture in the UK in partnership with The Henry Moore Institute. 

Sarah studied a BA History of Art at School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS, (University of London) and completed an MA Museology at the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Arts, (University of East Anglia).

Meet our nominators

Zoe Whitley
DirectorChisenhale Gallery, London
Zoe Whitley
Melissa Hinkin
CuratorArtes Mundi, Cardiff
Melissa Hinkin
Eoin Dara
Head of ExhibitionsDundee Contemporary Arts
Eoin Dara
Angelica Sule
CuratorSite Gallery, Sheffield
Angelica Sule
Robert Leckie
DirectorSpike Island, Bristol
Robert Leckie
Zoe Whitley
Zoe Whitley
Director
Chisenhale Gallery, London

https://chisenhale.org.uk/

Dr Zoé Whitley is Director of Chisenhale Gallery, London and an award-winning curator and writer. In 2019, she curated Cathy Wilkes’ British Council commission in the British Pavilion, at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia. Prior to this, she was Curator, International Art at Tate Modern (2014-2019) where she co-curated Tate Modern’s acclaimed 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. She is also co-curator, with Nancy Ireson, of the Barnes Foundation's 2020 exhibition Elijah Pierce's America

Melissa Hinkin
Melissa Hinkin
Curator
Artes Mundi, Cardiff

http://artesmundi.org/

Melissa Hinkin is the curator at Artes Mundi. Since her appointment in 2012 she has supported three large-scale editions of the biennial exhibition and prize held at the National Museum Cardiff and Chapter. She has curated several projects at the arts organization including the seminar series Dialogues on Conflict in partnership with universities and galleries across Wales, and produced Contra Diction: Speech Against Itself, a live audio essay by Lawrence Abu-Hamdan as part of Wales Millennium Centre inaugural Festival of Voice. As an independent producer, she has supported many projects and is currently producing The Rejoinders, an investigative, experimental curatorial and research project network between Wales and India.

Eoin Dara
Eoin Dara
Head of Exhibitions
Dundee Contemporary Arts

https://www.dca.org.uk/

Eoin Dara is an Irish curator based in Scotland working as Head of Exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts, or DCA

Recent curatorial work includes new commissions and publishing projects with artists Margaret Salmon, Patrick Staff, Emma Talbot and Alberta Whittle and writers CAConrad, Quinn Latimer, Christina Sharpe and Isabel Waidner. In his previous position as Curator at the MAC in Belfast, Dara staged major exhibition projects such as ‘Felix Gonzalez-Torres: This Place’. He has recently worked on juries and selection committees for Hayward Gallery, Glasgow International, LUX, and the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

A former student of the University of Edinburgh, Dara is also an alumnus of the ICI Curatorial Intensive programme. He was previously a director of Catalyst Arts, and a co-founder of the Household curatorial collective.

Angelica Sule
Angelica Sule
Curator
Site Gallery, Sheffield

https://www.sitegallery.org/

Angelica is a curator and writer with 13 years of experience working in contemporary art spaces. Supporting and providing a platform for underrepresented artists is at the core of her curatorial practice, which focuses on connections between people, science fiction, touch, empathy, community, collaboration, labour and intersectionality. 

Throughout her career she has worked closely with artists to develop nuanced and complex exhibitions and commissions, whilst embedding diversity and accessibility into everything she does. Angelica previously worked at Nottingham Contemporary and in 2015 completed the Young Curators Residency Programme at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. She graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2014 having previously worked at the University of the Arts London and Gallery Primo Alonso.

Robert Leckie
Robert Leckie
Director
Spike Island, Bristol

https://www.spikeisland.org.uk/

Robert Leckie is Director of Spike Island in Bristol. Prior to this he was Curator and Head of Programmes at Gasworks in London from 2011 to 2018. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths and the University of the Arts in London, and has written for Afterall, Rhizome and Mousse, among other publications.

19
May
2021
Emerging Artist Prize Winner: Shawanda Corbett
Shawanda Corbett is currently studying her doctorate in Fine Art at Oxford University. She was nominated for the KH...
Introducing Our Three Winners
Introducing Our Three Winners
Emerging Artist
Introducing Our Three Winners
Introducing Our Three Winners
Kleinwort Hambros emerging artist prize 2021
Kleinwort Hambros emerging artist prize 2021
ARTIST PRIZE 2021
Kleinwort Hambros emerging artist prize 2021
Kleinwort Hambros emerging artist prize 2021
Meet the artists
Meet the artists
Emerging Artist
Meet the artists
Meet the artists