Articulation adjudicators

Sam Ayre

Sam Ayre is an artist who specialises in participatory projects, creatively engaging groups of people in exploring their opinions and ideas, encouraging radical imagining, embracing tangents, conviviality and mistake-making. Their favourite medium is conversation. They have a supporting studio practice that expands upon these ideas and focuses on our relationship to the natural world, landscape and materials through wooden sculptural furniture, landscape painting and drawing. They have delivered commissions for Turner Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion, Towner, Tate Modern, Freelands Foundation, Art Night London and Charleston House amongst others and exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery.

Verity Babbs

Verity Babbs is an art historian, presenter, and comedian. She has written for the Guardian, Artnet News, and Hyperallergic and has worked on filmed projects for Tate, London Art Fair, and the National Film & Television School. She is the founder and host of Art Laughs art-themed comedy nights which have brought stand-up and improv events to the National Gallery, Royal Museums Greenwich, and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair. Her ‘1 Sentence Answer’ videos have been shared by BBC Upload and BBC 2. She was named one of HistoryExtra’s ‘30 Under 30’ in 2024. She took part in Articulation in 2015.

Simeon Barclay

Simeon Barclay, artist, spent his formative years employed as a machine operative whilst also being engaged in various youth subcultural movements across the UK in the 90’s. Channelling those alternative modes of expression, he would later attend art school. Barclay draws on a diverse visual language activating objects, that with humorous undertones, come to express the paradoxes and ambiguities of defining ourselves within culture and tradition. He works and lives.

Shahidha Bari

Shahidha Bari is an academic, critic and broadcaster. She is a Professor at the University of the Arts London, a presenter of BBC Radio 3's nightly Free Thinking programme, also known as the Arts and Ideas podcast, and the occasional host of BBC Radio 4's Front Row. She’s the author of “Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes” (2019), the winner of The Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize 2016 and has been a judge for the Forward Poetry Prizes and the Baillie Gifford Non-Fiction Prize. She writes for The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Frieze magazine.

Jane Bhoyroo

Jane Bhoyroo is Principal Keeper at Leeds Art Gallery. She was previously the founding Producer for Yorkshire Sculpture International, a unique collaboration between – Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Art Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park where she realised sculpture commissions with Huma Bhabha and Ayse Erkmen. Previous roles include: Sculpture Curator for the Arts Council Collection, Director of S1 Artspace, Visual Arts Relationship Manager for Arts Council England and working with Anthony Reynolds Gallery. She studied on the De Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam and has an MA in Art History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art. She is the Chair of Transform Festival in Leeds and originalprojects; in Great Yarmouth.

Alice Dodds

Alice Dodds is a historian of modern British art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in women’s environmental utopianism in the Arts and Crafts movement. She has worked with the William Morris Society and Hammersmith Climate Carnival on young people’s engagement with the environment through art, and has spoken internationally on visual culture and ecology in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dr Stephen Feeke

Stephen Feeke is an independent art historian, curator and art adviser. He specialises in sculpture and amongst recent ventures was the commissioning of new work for a major public realm project in Paddington Square, London (2024). His PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art focussed on Barbara Hepworth’s bronzes and he has written and lectured on aspects of Hepworth’s work around the world. He co-authored the catalogue accompanying the recent Hepworth exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2022) and has contributed a number of articles to the Burlington Magazine, Sculpture Journal and Museums Journal. He was previously Director at the New Art Centre, Roche Court, and a curator at the Henry Moore Institute.

Dr Susan Foister OBE

Susan Foister was formerly Deputy Director, Director of Public Programmes and Partnerships and Curator of Early Netherlandish and German Painting at the National Gallery. She has curated numerous exhibitions including ‘Holbein in England’ at Tate Britain and ‘Dürer’s Journeys’ at the National Gallery. Susan has championed the development of the National Gallery’s nationwide partnerships and its ambitions for its learning programmes, including Articulation.

Keith Harrison

Keith Harrison’s art practice is involved with the physical transformation of materials, to unpredictable effect, in a series of process-based public experiments. Previous works include launching a full-size clay Rover 75 off a monumental ramp in Cannock Chase Forest, submitting a ceramic soundsystem to the grindcore onslaught of Napalm Death and a live choreographed interruption in the life of Preston Bus Station involving 32 buses performing to a soundtrack by Preston Field Audio. Harrison was previously a Gasworks' International Fellow at KHOJ, Delhi, Ceramics Resident at the V&A Museum. He is currently Research Professor at Bath School of Art, Film and Media and Guest Professor at KHiO, Norway.

Tatyana Kalaydjian Serraino

Tatyana Kalaydjian Serraino is an Art Historian, Content Creator, and Presenter of Italian, Danish, and Armenian descent. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Art History from John Cabot University in Rome, and an MA in Arts & Culture Management from Rome Business School. Tatyana is the creator of About Art by Tatyana, a platform with half a million followers that makes Art History accessible through TikTok shorts, YouTube documentaries, and online courses. She has authored scholarly articles and has appeared on podcasts and television as both a host and expert guest. Tatyana is an Articulation Alumni.

Benjamin Kandler

Benjamin Kandler is an art market expert with broad experience in the fine art, tech and heritage sectors, specializing in contemporary and new media art. A History of Art graduate from Goldsmiths University, he now consults at the intersection of art, technology, and culture. Previously, he was Director at a London gallery as well as Phillips Auctioneer leading digital art projects across Europe, Asia, and North America, working with pioneering artists and heritage brands like Asprey and Bugatti. In 2022, he set the auction record for Vera Molnar, and his expertise has been featured in major publications such as the Financial Times. Benjamin is a 2017 Articulation Alumni.

Theresa Lola

Theresa Lola is a poet and writer and was appointed the Young People’s Laureate for London in the year 2019-20. In 2018 she was awarded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. In 2022 her poem ‘Equilibrium’ from her first poetry collection was added to OCR’s GCSE English Literature syllabus. She holds an Mst in Creative Writing from University of Oxford. She has previously been commissioned by Selfridges, Rimowa, and National Gallery. Her second poetry collection Ceremony for the Nameless (2024) is published by Penguin.

Dr Catriona McAra

Dr Catriona McAra is a lecturer in modern and contemporary art history and honorary curatorial fellow at the University of Aberdeen. Catriona previously held senior curatorial positions at University of St Andrews and Leeds Arts University where her exhibitors included Yoko Ono, Mieke Bal and Ilana Halperin. She was awarded her doctorate from University of Glasgow and undertook post-doctoral research at University of Edinburgh. She is a leading authority on feminist-surrealism having published books on Dorothea Tanning (Routledge, 2017) and Leonora Carrington (Manchester University Press, 2022). Catriona is currently writing a third book on Scottish contemporary artist-women (Edinburgh University Press).

Debbie Meniru

Debbie Meniru is a London-based writer and curator. Her writing leans into emotion, anecdote and humour to explore art as a deeply personal experience that reaches far beyond the walls of the gallery. Her words have been published internationally and her text ‘Fried yam in the museum’ is on the syllabus of the MA Curating programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Debbie has curated The Conch at South London Gallery and outdoor installations by Jyll Bradley and Souad Abdelrasoul at the Hayward Gallery. She is currently Assistant Curator of Interpretation at Tate Modern and Tate Britain.

Prof Jennifer Powell

Prof Jennifer Powell is Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, and Barber Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham. Prior to this, she was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. She is a respected scholar in the field of modern and contemporary art, especially sculpture and exhibition cultures since 1945, an area in which she has published widely.

Jennifer begun her curatorial career with the V&A before taking up the post of Assistant Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain in 2010. She was appointed Head of Collections, Programme and Research at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in 2013, and played a key role in the gallery’s £11.5 million redevelopment project.

Dr. Claudine van Hensbergen

Dr. Claudine van Hensbergen is Associate Professor at Northumbria University and has published widely on literature and art. She was UKRI Leadership Fellow for the project “Learning through the Art Gallery: Art, Literature and Disciplinarity” (2019–2023) run in collaboration with The Laing Art Gallery. She continues to engage with The Laing’s collections in work with secondary school pupils, undergraduates and PhD students. Her next publication (for Cambridge University Press) is a study of Aphra Behn's grave in Westminster Abbey, exploring the relationship between England's first professional woman writer and histories of Poet's Corner.