The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and appreciation of the visual arts through exhibitions, education and debate.
Sonia Dawn Boyce,, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. With an emphasis on collaborative work, Boyce has been working closely with other artists since 1990, often involving improvisation and spontaneous performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than thirty years in several art colleges across the UK.
Mira Calix ( MIRR-ə KAY-liks; is a British-based artist signed to Warp Records. Although her earlier music is almost exclusively electronic, since the 2000s she has incorporated writing for classical instrumentation into her musical works and expanded her practice to include multidisciplinary performance, film and multi- channel installation artworks. She has often stated that she considers sound a sculptural material.
Paul Seawright is a Northern Irish artist. He is the professor of photography and the Deputy Vice Chancellor at Ulster University in Belfast/Derry/Coleraine. Seawright lives in his birthplace of Belfast.
Keith Piper is a leading contemporary British artist, curator, critic and academic. He was a founder member of the groundbreaking BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students, mostly based in the West Midlands region of the UK.
Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye, also known as Nike Okundaye, Nike Twins Seven Seven and Nike Olaniyi, is a Nigerian batik and Adire textile designer.
Ali Omar Ermes was a Libyan artist and author. His paintings make use of Arabic calligraphy, often superimposed on a rich-textured ground, and may incorporate fragments of Arabic or other poetry or prose. He had lived in the United Kingdom since 1981, and was the chairman of the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in Kensington in west London; he was also active in other intellectual and cultural institutions in that city.
Mitra Tabrizian is a British-Iranian photographer and film director. She is a professor of photography at the University of Westminster, London. Mitra Tabrizian has exhibited and published widely and in major international museums and galleries, including her solo exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2008. Her books Another Country, with texts by Homi Bhabha, David Green, and Hamid Naficy, is published by Hatje Cantz in 2012.
Raimi Olakunle Gbadamosi is a contemporary British conceptual artist and writer. His work addresses themes of identity and art theory, using his trademark motif of yellow, white and black.
George "Fowokan" Kelly is a Jamaican-born visual artist who lives in Britain and exhibits using the name "Fowokan". He is a largely self-taught artist, who has been practising sculpture since 1980. His work is full of the ambivalence he sees in the deep-rooted spiritual and mental conflict between the African and the European. Fowokan's work is rooted in the traditions of pre-colonial Africa and ancient Egypt rather than the Greco-Roman art of the west. He has also been a jeweller, essayist, poet and musician.
The Edinburgh Art Festival is an annual visual arts festival, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, during August and coincides with the Edinburgh International and Fringe festivals. The Art Festival was established in 2004, and receives public funding from Creative Scotland. The Festival Director, Sorcha Carey, was appointed in 2011.
Philip Jonathan Clifford Mould OBE is an English art dealer, London gallery owner, art historian, writer and broadcaster. He has made a number of major art discoveries, including works of Thomas Gainsborough, Anthony Van Dyck and Thomas Lawrence.
Augustus Casely-Hayford, is a British curator, cultural historian, broadcaster and lecturer with Ghanaian roots. He is presently the Director of V&A East and formerly, the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in June 2018 for his services to Arts and Culture. and Professor of Practice at SOAS in 2021. He was commissioned to present a second TV series of Tate Walks for Sky Arts in 2017 featuring David Bailey, Helena Bonham Carter, Billy Connolly, Robert Lindsay, Jeremy Paxman and Harriet Walter. Casely-Hayford was awarded the Leader of the Year for Arts and Media by the Black British Business Awards 2017. He delivered a TED talk in August 2017. He has been awarded a Cultural Fellowship at King's College, London, and a Fellowship at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000's, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that they "identify as a human being".
Lubaina Himid CBE is a British artist and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities.
Vanley Burke is a British Jamaican photographer and artist, who has been described as "the Godfather of Black British Photography", with his body of work "regarded as the greatest photographic record of African Caribbean people in post-war Britain".
Dr. Chila Kumari Burman is a British artist. A significant figure in the Black British Art movement of the 1980s, Burman was one of the first British Asian female artists to have a monograph written about her work: Lynda Nead's Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures (1995), and a second monograph by Nead was published in 2012.
Althea McNishFSCD was a British textile designer of Trinidadian origin who has been called the first British designer of African descent to earn an international reputation. Born in Trinidad, McNish moved to Britain in the 1950s. She was associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in the 1960s, participating in CAM's exhibitions and seminars and helping to promote Caribbean arts to a British public. Her work is represented in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Whitworth Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture and the Cooper-Hewitt, among other places.
Giovanni Aloi is an author and curator who teaches modern and contemporary art at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby's Institute of Art. He is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and, with curator and author Caroline Picard, Aloi is the co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press book series Art after Nature.
Africa '95 or Africa 95, styled as africa95, was a Britain-wide celebration of African music, art, dance and poetry that was held over several months during the last quarter of 1995, with more than 60 arts institutions throughout the UK participating in related events. It was chaired by English businessman Sir Michael Caine, with Clémentine Deliss as artistic director, under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth II, President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, and President Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal.
