Sarah Perks

Sarah Perks is an interdisciplinary curator, academic and writer and currently Professor of MIMA School of Art & Design at Teesside University, England. One of Creative Review’s 50 Creative Leaders in 2017, Sarah has led major participation, performance and curatorial projects with international artists including AL and AL, Rosa Barba, Judith Barry, Phil Collins, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Stanya Kahn, David Lynch, Rachel Maclean, Noorafshan Mirza & Brad Butler, Rashid Rana and Qasim Riza Shaheen. Group exhibitions include The Return of Memory (2017) exploring the post-Soviet ‘New East’; La Movida (2017) responding to 40 years since the first elections in Spain; Imitation of Life: Race and Melodrama in the 21st Century (2016), co-curated with Omar Kholeif. Developing her career in education at Cornerhouse, Manchester, she became the inaugural Artistic Director (Visual Art) of HOME and Professor of Visual Art at Manchester School of Art in 2014.

Sarah has published over twenty essays and books across critical and creative writing, the most recent Artists Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 is co-edited with Erika Balsom and Lucy Reynolds (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art & Yale University Press, 2019). She is co-founder and director of Feature Expanded, a trailblazing development programme for visual artists making feature films. Sarah is a research director of Asia Triennial Manchester, Chair of Islington Mill Foundation (Salford), a trustee of Alchemy Film & Arts (Hawick, Scotland), editor of the Engage Journal (the international journal of visual art and gallery education) and Programme Advisor (Artist Moving Image) for the BFI London Film Festival.

• interdisciplinary and collaborative curatorial strategies
• strategies of participation in contemporary art
• socio-economics, inclusion and artistic practice
• artist moving image