Speaker biographies

Amy Tobin is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, and Curator of Contemporary Programmes at Kettle’s Yard. Her work has focused on art and feminism, as well as collectivity, friendship and political struggle. Her monograph Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation was published by Yale University Press in 2023. In the same year she published a major article on the artist Candace Hill-Montgomery in Art History. She is also the co-editor of the 2024 reissue of Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami with Luke Roberts and Grassroots Artmaking: Political Struggle and Activist Art in the UK, 1960–Present (2026) with Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani and Catherine Spencer. A Co-I on the AHRC-IRC funded project Feminist Art Making Histories, she is also one of the presenters of the Feminist Art Lives podcast. 

Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter is a Moldovan artist who positions herself as a post-socialist subject, reflecting on socialist legacies, post-socialist memory, and human–nature relations through a critical engagement with modernity. Her recent work investigates how material, vegetal, and other-than-human agents participate in social, political, and cultural processes, proposing alternative ways of understanding history, ecology, and nature. In 2023–2024, she was a fellow at the Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen Fellowship Program for Art and Theory in Innsbruck, Austria. Her work has been presented at The Listening Biennial, Berlin, Germany (2025); Nature After Nature, Timișoara, Romania (2025); Grey Is a Cube, Blue Is an Ellipse, Amiens, France (2025); Contemporary Art Week, Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2024); and The Secret Life of Plants and Trees, Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck, Austria (2024).

Martin Aidnik is an Estonian sociologist and scholar of higher education. He has been a postdoctoral fellow in the UK and a researcher in Lithuania. He has published one monograph: The Public University as a Real Utopia: Towards a Renewal of Higher Education (2024) and over a dozen academic articles. 

Sabina Kuangaliyeva is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is built on a critical engagement with photography as a tool of looking: decoding landscapes, reading material traces, and questioning spectatorship itself. Working across installation and artistic research, she extends this practice into other dimensions through theory and collective practices. Sabina studies the technogenic catastrophes of Kazakhstan, engaging with the material remnants of these events as a way to access the structure of collective trauma and the mythology that grows from it. Working with anthropogenic minerals and the intersection of personal and collective memory, she studies what persists in landscape, matter, and in the body after ecological and historical rupture. Member of the ORTA Collective (2018–2024), she co-authored publications and co-curated projects including the inaugural Kazakhstani Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). Her research has been featured in Cosmic Bulletin 2022 by The Institute of the Cosmos (IOTC) and in The GABR Project, premiered at New York Spectacular Experiments (2024). Recent exhibitions include Everything is Lost & Therefore Safe, Atelier Cauchemar, Almaty (2025), New York Spectacular Experiments (2024), Here, There, Nowhere, Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture (2021).

Ádám Ulbert is an artist and researcher based in Budapest. He obtained a doctorate degree at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts Budapest. He participated in a postgraduate residency program at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten Amsterdam, as well as programs such as: MQ Art and Ecology residency, Vienna, TAAK Summer School / Chinati Foundation Marfa, Texas, Asian Culture Center – Rjksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Dialogue and Exchange Programme, Gwangju. His exhibitions included, among others: Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, Karlin Studios, Prague, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, Klíma Biennale Wien 2026, EKO 9 Triennial of Art and Environment, Maribor 2024, Villa Du Parc Contemporary Art Center, Annemasse, Halle Für Kunst, Steiermark, Graz.

Zoja Vukmanovic is an igneous petrologist with a strong interest in magmatic ore deposits. Her research is focused on understanding the processes that occur before and after the solidification of rocks. She is particularly interested in the role of fluid dynamics in the formation of crystal-rich systems, and the concentration of ore minerals. To understand fluid mechanical and thermodynamic processes in mineralised igneous systems, she relies on field observations, detailed microstructural/textural measurements and state-of-the-art mineral geochemistry. In 2014, Zoja completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia. In 2016, she was awarded the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for the project “EFOX – The formation and evolution of monomineralic oxide layers in mafic intrusions”.

Dominic Bradbury is a writer, journalist, researcher and lecturer. His many books include the Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Masterpieces (Phaidon), South Bank: Architecture & Design (Batsford) and The Iconic Housecollection of books published by Thames & Hudson. Dominic’s research interests include modernist architecture, mid-century modern design and brutalism, while his PhD thesis was a comparative study looking at the work of post-war British architects Denys Lasdun and Richard Seifert. He has a number of new books in development and is a visiting researcher at the University of East Anglia.  

Matthew Taunton is an Associate Professor in Literature at the University of East Anglia, specialising in modern and contemporary writing. He is the author of Red Britain: the Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture (2019) and Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (2009) and co-editor (with Benjamin Kohlmann) A History of 1930s British Literature (2019).

Ed Krčma is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of East Anglia. He works on art since 1945, focusing especially on that made in Europe and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and on contemporary practice. Ideas of particularly interest concern questions about art’s involvement with the conditions of everyday life; the image/text dialogue; the relationship of contemporary art to medieval and early modern art and thought; and in the history and theory of drawing. His first monograph, published by Yale University Press in 2017, explored the extraordinary solvent transfer drawings that Robert Rauschenberg made after Dante’s Inferno, 1958-60. His scholarly essays – on artists such as Wols, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Tacita Dean – have been pubished in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, The Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings, and in exhibition catalogues for institutions including the MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), the National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin), and the Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh).

Sorcha Thomson (SAVA UEA) is an interdisciplinary historian of twentieth century anti-colonial and socialist movements. She is particularly interested in the role of tricontinental movements and their solidarity networks in shaping global political agendas and imaginations. As SAVA Research Fellow in Global Socialisms, her current project investigates the transnationalism of Cuban agrarian reform between 1959 and the 1970s, a program of land redistribution that transformed the island and its socio-ecological relations.

Makar Tereshin (SAVA UEA) is a social anthropologist and documentary photographer. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London. His research interests concern material culture studies, environmental and visual anthropology. Makar specialises in the ethnographic study of large-scale technological and industrial infrastructures, with a focus on the social, political, and environmental transformations they generate in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Documentation