Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s | Keynotes

Each keynote speaker will be running a masterclass for postgraduates and early career researchers. See here for more information.

Jill Burke a leading international expert in Italian Renaissance Art. Her research and teaching focuses on the representation and understanding of the body in Italy and Europe from around 1400-1600 and she has published widely in this field. Her latest monograph, The Italian Renaissance Nude, will be published with Yale University Press in 2018, and soon after an exhibition on the Renaissance Nude that Jill was involved in organising will take place at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, then the Royal Academy in London. Jill won the Philip Leverhulme prize for her “outstanding” contribution to art history, and has also held a fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti, Florence).

Previous to working on subjects relating to the body, Jill’s work has focused on topics relating to social identity and the visual arts. Her interest in periodization led to her edited book, Rethinking the High Renaissance (Routledge, 2012); her interest in patronage and identity was discussed in her first monograph which was based on extensive archival research – Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (2004). Perhaps her happiest research moment was stumbling across a previously unknown scribbled note on the back of a receipt from 1509 describing a robot lion made by Leonardo da Vinci. The subsequent article “Meaning and Crisis in the Early Sixteenth Century” was published in Oxford Art Journal (2006).

Dr. Maura Reilly is an arts writer and curatorial activist. She is the founder and director of Curatorial Activism Consulting – an art consultancy firm in NYC committed to addressing sexism and racism in the art world. Previously, Reilly served as Executive Director of the National Academy of Design (in New York), Chair and Professor of Art Theory at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia), and has held Senior Curator positions at the American Federation of Arts and Location One, both in New York City. As Founding Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, she launched the first exhibition and public programming space in the USA devoted exclusively to feminist art, where she organized multiple exhibitions, including the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party and the blockbuster Global Feminisms (co-curated with Linda Nochlin). Reilly has authored and edited many books and articles on contemporary art, including most recently Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (Thames & Hudson, 2018) and Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (Thames & Hudson, 2015). Other major publications include monographs on artists Ghada Amer, Nayland Blake, and Richard Bell. Reilly is a founding member of The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) — an organization dedicated to fighting discrimination against women in the art world. She is also a founder, along with Helena Reckitt and Lara Perry of fCU (Feminist Curators United), a network of curators and scholars committed to feminist curatorial practice. Reilly is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including ArtTable’s Future Women Leadership Award and a President’s Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, and, in 2015, was voted one of the 50 most influential people in the art world, by both Blouin Art Info and Art & Auction. Dr. Reilly holds a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. For more information, please visit www.maurareilly.com.

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington. He is an expert in the general theory and historiography of photography who has helped to pioneer the study of vernacular photography. Batchen has published extensively, in twenty-three languages to date, and has curated numerous exhibitions around the world, the most recent being Still Looking: Peter McLeavey and the Last Photograph (Adam Art Gallery, 2018) and Live from the Moon ({Suite}, 2019). He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (MIT Press, 2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); William Henry Fox Talbot (Phaidon, 2008); What of Shoes: Van Gogh and Art History (Seemann Henschel, 2009); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (Izu Photo Museum, 2010); Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (Prestel, 2016); and Obraz a diseminace: Za novou historii pro fotografii (NAMU, 2016). A new collection of his essays, 更多的疯狂念头 [More Wild Ideas: History, Photography, Writing], appeared in Chinese in 2017. He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (MIT Press, 2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (Reaction, 2012). His latest book is Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (Power Publications, 2018). In January 2020, Batchen will be taking up the Professorship of Art History at Oxford University in the UK.