TrAIN - Directory - TrAIN Members

Dr Michael Asbury

TrAIN Member - Deputy Director

I was born in Teresópolis, in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro, the son of British missionaries. After twenty years in Brazil I came to England to study engineering but fortunately to myself (and others) changed course and went on to complete an MA in The Study of Contemporary Art at Liverpool University and a PhD in the History and Theory of Art at The London Institute (now UAL). The former focused on British art and architecture in the post-war era, while the latter took me back to Brazil through the work of Hélio Oiticica and his relation to the development of modernism in Brazil and elsewhere.
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Professor Oriana Baddeley

TrAIN Member

I was born in Singapore and grew up in Europe and the UK, studying History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex. My doctoral subject formed the basis for work on the 1992 Hayward exhibition The Art of Ancient Mexico. I have written extensively on contemporary Latin American art, notably including Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America (Verso 1989, co-author Valerie Fraser) and collaborated with inIVA and Gerardo Mosquera to produce Beyond the Fantastic: Art Criticism from Contemporary Latin America (inIVA/MIT 1996).
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Professor Sonia Boyce

TrAIN Member

In the broadest sense, my research interests lie in art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this burgeoning field. Since the 1990s my own art practice has relied on working with other people in collaborative and participatory situations, often demanding of those collaborators spontaneity and unrehearsed performative actions. Working across media, mainly drawing, print, photography, video and sound, I recoup the remains of these performative gestures – the leftovers, the documentation – to make the art works, which are often concerned with the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator.
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Professor Deborah Cherry

TrAIN Member - Deputy Director

I studied in the UK (Edinburgh and London) and I have worked in the UK, the USA, and in Europe, where I am now at the University of Amsterdam. Following my PhD I have written extensively on art in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with two books, Painting Women (1994) and Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture (2000) along with exhibitions such as ‘The Edwardian Era’ (co-curated 1987). These projects, and other essays, have investigated how art and artistic practices and receptions were shaped by formations of gender, race and ethnicity, and relations of power.
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Professor Jane Collins

TrAIN Member

Jane Collins, Professor of Theatre and Performance.
I am a writer, director and theatre-maker who has worked all over the UK and internationally including The Royal Court in London, The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, The Theatre Royal in York and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. My research locates theatre and performance within the wider discourse of arts practice. It uses scenography as a frame of reference and an analytical focus to consider the interrelatedness of all the elements that make up a performance event and to (re) assess the role of ‘live’ performance in a social arena increasingly dominated by electronic and digital media. In my practice and my critical writing I am engaged in making and reflecting on performances that expand conventional notions of theatrical space and explore the potential of new psycho/spatial relations between actors and audience. This has resulted in the production of new works as well unconventional readings of canonical texts.
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Dr. David Dibosa

TrAIN Member

David Dibosa trained as a curator, after receiving his first degree from Girton College, University of Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD in Art History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. During the 1990s, he curated public art projects. He is currently Course Leader for MA Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design in the University of the Arts, London. He is also a Researcher in the University of the Arts Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN).
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Dr. Yuko Kikuchi

TrAIN Member - Reader

I was born in Tokyo and trained in Japan, the USA and UK. My on-going interest in cross-cultural dimensions of arts started with the UK-Japan cultural relations that produced an international travelling exhibition and book Ruskin in Japan 1890-1940: Nature for Art, Art for Life (1997), followed by my PhD work on the Japanese folkcrafts (Mingei) movement which led to the subsequent publication of Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism (2004).
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Professor Carol Tulloch

TrAIN Member

I was born in England of Jamaican parents and originally trained as a fashion and textiles designer. I gained my Masters degree in the History of Design at the V&A/RCA, London. The combined elements of my personal and professional life have shaped my interest in studying dress and black identities as dialogues on the ‘self’. This has been debated through published articles such as ‘Out of Many, One People’?: The Relativity of Dress, Race and Ethnicity to Jamaica, 1880-1907 (1998), ‘“My Man, Let Me Pull Your Coat to Something: Malcolm X’ (2001), and ‘Strawberries and Cream: Dress, Migration and the Quintessence of Englishness’ (2002).
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Professor Toshio Watanabe

TrAIN Member - Director

I grew up in a transnational environment. My father is Japanese and my mother German from Transylvania in Romania. I was born in Bern, Switzerland, but grew up in Japan. I studied at the Universities of Sophia (in Tokyo), Tokyo, London (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Basel, where I completed my PhD. I first started to teach at the City of Birmingham Polytechnic, where I ran the MA in History of Art and Design. Then I came to Chelsea in 1986, initially as the Head of Art History, later becoming Head of Research and now the Director of the TrAIN Research Centre.
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