Staff

Meet our academic and professional staff at Dartington Trust.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.