Staff

Meet our academic and professional staff at Dartington Trust.

Dr Ric Allsopp

Dr Ric Allsopp is Associate Faculty for Theatre: Reimagining Performance Practice.

Emma Bush

emma.bush@dartington.org

Emma Bush is senior lecturer, Poetics of Imagination and Associate Lecture for Theatre: Reimagining Performance Practice. She works in the field of art and ecology, making performance, site-specific walks, writing and workshops.

Mohini Chandra

mohini.chandra@dartington.org

Mohini is Associate Lecturer on the Arts and Place programme.

Mohini's multimedia work on the international flows of people and culture in our globalised world has exhibited in venues such as the Asia Society and Museum (New York), the Queens Museum (New York), the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne) the First Johannesburg Biennale, Photo Kathmandu, in ‘Now! Now!’ at Chelsea College of Art and the Casula Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Recent projects made in the Pacific region and in India have been exhibited at the Third Oceanic Performance Biennial (Auckland) the Biennial Focus Festival of Photography (Mumbai), the Houston FotoFest Biennial, as well as in the Chennai Photo Biennale. Mohini has lived and worked in Australia, the Pacific, India and the UK.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, Mohini has received funding and awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Autograph ABP, the Arts Council England, the British Council, the Australia Council for the Arts and Asialink. Her work has also recently been recognised by the Hundred Heroines-Women in Photography Award and a nomination for the Jarman Film Award (2021).

She was awarded an Art Council/National Lottery grant for her project ‘Paradise Lost’ which examines the complexities of colonial seafaring through the archaeology of shipwrecks (exhibited at MIRROR in Plymouth, 2021) and a commission from Autograph for the new moving image work ‘Belated’, which explores the recent global pandemic within a Devon market town- incorporating the work of Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Mohini was awarded the 2021-22 Arts Institute Film Commission, to make the film ‘Tall Tales and Wonder Rooms’ (2022), and has been working with the Box Museum moving image collections and the SHIPS Project archaeology team in Plymouth. These recent projects explore links between the local and the global, examining untold tales of cultural encounter and our relationship with nature, within local mythology and seafaring narratives of the South West.

For Mohini, the combination of photography, found and archival material, moving image, sound and other installation media enables the visual expression of personal experience and a ‘mapping’ of alternate narratives within the complex conditions of globalisation. Her research encompasses both thinking and making around photography through a range of curatorial, writing and publishing projects. Her recent article Plane Views was published by Taylor and Francis in the Journal of Photography & Culture, while artist publications include the photobook ‘album pacifica’, published by Autograph and ‘Day of Shadows’ (published by the Artist Book Collective/ Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.

Her work is held in international collections including the Arts Council Collection UK and included in major survey publications such as Phaidon’s Art and Photography by David Campany and Bloomsbury’s Photography in India in Light Years and Digital Times, by Aileen Blaney & Chinar Shah.

mohinichandra.com

Jo Joelson

jo.joelson@dartington.org

Dr Jo Joelson is Programme Lead for MA Arts and Place. She is a London based artist, researcher and writer.

Having originally trained as a lighting designer she pursued a career as a light artist working across art, music and theatre before forming the art partnership London Fieldworks, working over two decades to produce works that respond to ecology as a complex inter-working of social, natural and technological worlds. These works, often socially engaged and involving extended periods of research, have been made in the landscape, for the gallery, screen and radio.

Jo has been awarded International Fellowships and residencies to undertake research and fieldwork, including at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California; Headlands Center for the Arts, USA; Space Plasma Physics Group, Dept. Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester; Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts, Iceland; Vatnasafn/Library of Water, Iceland; Living Art Museum, Iceland; Northeast Greenland National Park; and Reserva Ecológica De Guapiaçu, Brasil. Her collaborative projects, films, artworks and architectures have received awards, honours and special mentions from Ars Electronica, VIDA International Art and Artificial Life, The Arts Foundation, AJ Architecture Awards and London Short Film Festival.

Jo has a Master’s (Distinction) in curating art, design and new media and completed her AHRC-funded doctorate in 2020, receiving her PhD for Library of Light: a framework to explore light, material culture and social experience from the University of Sunderland, UK.
Jo has co-edited a number of publications including Null Object: Gustav Metzger thinks about nothing, published by Black Dog (2012); Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture, a project centred on London Fieldworks’ Outlandia project in the Scottish Highlands, published by Routledge (2015). Her recently authored, Library of Light: encounters with artists and designers, was published by Lund Humphries (2019) and examines the role light plays in the new frontiers of art, design and technology and its impact on our cultural history. Most recently Jo has collaborated with writer and thinker Timothy Morton on a future documentary Confronting our Erasure Through Art for BBC4. She also recently contributed the essay Violence Power, Surveillance: From the Blind Lantern to the Searchlight for “White Torture” to a bilingual publication (German/English) published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König to accompany Power! Light! a forthcoming exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2021-22).

londonfieldworks.com

Natasha Rivett-Carnac

natasha.rivettcarnac@dartington.org

Natasha Rivett-Carnac is Curator of Arts and Ecology at Dartington School of Arts. She has been working in the arts and culture space for 20 years.

Alice Oswald

alice.oswald@dartington.org

Alice Oswald studied Classics at Oxford and then trained as a gardener. She has written six collections of poetry.

Tom Rivett-Carnac

Tom Rivett-Carnac is Associate Faculty for MFA Arts and Ecology at Dartington School of Arts. He s a political lobbyist for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and an author on climate change policy.

Martin Shaw

martin.shaw@schumachercollege.org.uk

Martin is currently Reader and Programme Lead for our Poetics of Imagination programme. His work circles mythology and landscape, oral storytelling and poetics.

He established the Poetics of Imagination programme, working in collaboration with Dr Tracey Warr, having previously co-led with Dr Carla Stang the Myth and Ecology MA at Schumacher College.

He founded both the Oral Tradition and Living Myth courses at Stanford University, and was Artistic Director of the Great Mother Conference in Maine for nine years, inheriting the position from Robert Bly.
His areas of interest are Irish myth and folklore, the philosophy of John Moriarty, the Grail legend of Parzival, Siberian folk tales and indigenous culture, contemporary Romanticism, Ethnopoetics, the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca and Ted Hughes.

His work has ranged from writing the 2019 catalogue for Ai Weiwei, Life Cycle, to a 101 day vigil in a Dartmoor forest, which became the book Wolferland. He has been awarded the Price, Bretherton, Elgood Award for outstanding achievements in the arts, and the Summerfield Scholarship to the British School in Rome. His first book, A Branch from The Lightning Tree, won the Nautilus Book Prize. Amongst others he has been published in The Mississippi Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry International, Orion, Poetry Magazine and the New England Review.
His books are Bardskull (2022); Elk Bone is Bright Owl (2022); A Hut at the Edge of the Village: The Beauty and Trouble of John Moriarty (2021); Smoke Hole (2021); Red Bead Woman (2020); All Those Barbarians (2020); Wolferland (2020); Courting the Wild Twin (2020); Wolf Milk: Chthonic Memory in the Deep Wild (2019); The Night Wages (2019, 2020); The Five Fathoms (Hedgespoken Press, 2018); The Mythteller trilogy: Scatterlings (2016), Snowy Tower (2014), A Branch from the Lightning Tree (2011).

His translations are Poems of Lorca: Courting the Dawn (with Stephan Harding) (Cista Mystica Press, 2019); Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems (with Tony Hoagland) (Graywolf Press, 2020).

His essays include Ai Weiwei: Life Cycle (Marciano Art Foundation, 2019); An Earth That Thinks in Myth: Temenos Academy Review (Temenos Academy, 2019); Ted Hughes: Etiquette of the Uncanny (The Ted Hughes Society Journal, 2018); Small Gods: Oikosophia, From the Intelligence of the Heart to Ecophilosophy (Associazione Culturale Mimesis, 2017).

drmartinshaw.com

Bram Thomas Arnold

Bram.Arnold@dartington.org

Dr Bram Thomas Arnold is an artist who started with walking and kept going into performance, drawing, installation, writing and academia. He is Associate Lecturer for our Poetics of Imagination programme.

Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas

Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas are Associate Faculty for MFA Arts and Ecology. Urbonas Studio have an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries.

They collaborate with experts in different cultural fields to develop practice-based artistic research models that allow participants—including their students—to pursue works that merge urbanism, new media, social sciences and pedagogy to critically address the transformation of civic space and ecology.

They have exhibited internationally including the São Paulo (twice), Berlin, Moscow (twice), Lyon, Gwangju, Busan, Taipei Biennales, Folkestone Triennial – and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions – among numerous other international shows, including a solo show at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Their awards include the Lithuanian National Prize (2007); Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006) and best national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007). They are co-founders of the JUTEMPUS interdisciplinary art program (1993), the first independent artist-led initiative in Lithuania.

Their writing on artistic research as a form of intervention into social and political crisis was published in Devices for Action (MACBA, 2008) and Villa Lituania (Sternberg, 2008). Urbonas co-edited Public Space? Lost and Found (MIT Press, 2017) that brings together artists, planners, theorists and art historians in an examination of the complex inter-relations between the creation and uses of public space and the role played by public art. Urbonas’s five-year research project Zooetics explored the potential to connect with the noetics and poetics of non-human life in the context of planetary ecological imbalance. Zooetics concluded in 2018 with a symposium at MIT and opened a new research program focusing on Climate Visions. They curated the Swamp School – a future learning environment at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. The book Swamps and the New Imagination: On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture and Philosophy published by Sternberg Press and distributed by MIT Press, is forthcoming in 2020.

Gediminas Urbonas is currently Associate Professor at MIT‘s Program in Art, Culture and Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has held teaching positions at NTNU – Norwegian University for Science and Technology (2005-2009), VDU – Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, CAFA – Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, and NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arte in Milano.

Tracey Warr

Tracey is a fiction and non-fiction writer and also works with text in the vicinity of art. She is an Associate Lecturer on our Poetics of Imagination programme.

Staff

Dr Ric Allsopp

Emma Bush

Mohini Chandra

Jo Joelson

Natasha Rivett-Carnac

Alice Oswald

Tom Rivett-Carnac

Martin Shaw

Bram Thomas Arnold

Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas

Tracey Warr

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Staff

Dr Ric Allsopp

Emma Bush

Mohini Chandra

Jo Joelson

Natasha Rivett-Carnac

Alice Oswald

Tom Rivett-Carnac

Martin Shaw

Bram Thomas Arnold

Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas

Tracey Warr

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