Maria Balshaw

Maria Balshaw is Director of Tate, a role she has held since June 2017. She has overall responsibility for Tate’s strategic direction and day to day operations, working with a talented group of colleagues to further Tate’s mission to promote the public understanding and enjoyment of British art, and of twentieth-century and contemporary art. As Director, Maria is also the Accounting Officer appointed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

Previously, as Director of the Whitworth, University of Manchester and Manchester City Galleries, Maria was responsible for the artistic and strategic vision for each gallery. During this period, Maria oversaw the £17 million transformation of the Whitworth, which was subsequently awarded the Art Fund Museum of the Year award for 2015. As Director of Culture for Manchester City Council from 2013-2017, Maria played a leading role in establishing the city as a major cultural centre, including the development of a new £110 million arts venue, the Factory, as the new site for Manchester International Festival from 2020.

Maria is a Board Member of The Clore Leadership Programme and Manchester International Festival, she was a Board Member of Arts Council England until March 2018. Maria was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the arts in June 2015.

Read the Keynote by Maria Balshaw here.

Photography: Hugo Glendinning, 2017  

Elizabeth Giorgis

Elizabeth Giorgis is Associate Professor of Art History, Criticism and Theory in the College of Performing and Visual Art and the Center for African Studies at Addis Ababa University. She is also the Director of the Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University. She served as Dean of the College of Performing and Visual Art and as Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies of Addis Ababa University. She is the editor and author of several publications.

She has curated several exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum, Gebre Kristos Desta Center, more recently an exhibition of Julie Mehretu’s work titled “Julie, the Addis Show,” the exhibition “Addis Ababa the Enigma of the New and the Modern that showcased four artists who engaged the changing cityscape of Addis Ababa, and the exhibition “Time Sensitive Activity” by the Danish Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. She has also participated in several international conferences and public lectures, more recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her book Modernist Art in Ethiopia, which is the first comprehensive monographic study of Ethiopian visual modernism within a broader social and intellectual history is currently in press and is expected to be released in Fall/Winter 2018.

Berhanu Ashagrie

Berhanu Ashagrie is an Ethiopian Visual Artist, and an Assistant Professor at Addis Ababa University, Alle School of Fine Arts and Design. He has also worked as a Director of the school nearly for four years, until April 2016. Berhanu has studied his main education in Ethiopia and Europe and currently, he is working as a researcher at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts on a project funded by Peek.

Berhanu has actively been engaged in various cultural, educational and professional activities in local and international platforms, on which he managed to initiate, organize, participate and contribute in different international conferences, workshops, festivals, biennales; like Video_Brasil ‘Southern Panoramas’ - Sao Paulo, Bamako Biennale ‘Telling Time’ – Bamako, European Forum Alpbach Seminar ‘Inequality’ - Alpbach, Future Memories International Conference ‘Art, Public Space and the Culture of Memory’ - Addis Ababa, Institute of Spatial Experiments ‘Acting Archives’ – Berlin and Addis Ababa, International Conference ‘Sounds of Change and Urban Transformations’ - Addis Ababa, 1st Tbilisi Triennial - ‘Offside Effect’ – Georgia, ‘You’re here is Our Here’ - Studio Olafur Eliasson – Berlin, 1st Former West Congress, Utrecht.

As a visual artist, Berhanu has mainly been focused on issues that come along with the idea and activities of change/ development/transformation /modernization on urban spaces/places and the human conditions in it. He is very much interested on process-based creative production activities that generate open-ended possibilities to interact, engage, discuss, react and imagine; beyond the everyday. He realized various individual and collective artistic projects inside and outside studio environment. Multidisciplinary creative outcomes of his projects have reputedly been shown internationally in Ethiopia, Germany, Netherlands, Georgia, Italy, Austria, Greece, Spain and England.

Jeanette Winterson

Born in Manchester, England, Jeanette Winterson, CBE, is the author of seventeen books, including the national bestseller Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, and The Passion.

She has won many prizes including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, and the Stonewall Award.

Jeanette was born in 1959. Her mother was 17, and worked in a factory called Raffles, sewing overcoats for Marks and Spencer. 1 of 10 children herself, Ann couldn’t keep her new daughter and she was adopted by Jack and Constance Winterson who raised her in the nearby town of Accrington. Jeanette’s new parents were Pentecostals – a religious evangelical group who read the Bible more or less literally, and believe in the Second Coming of Christ and the End of the World. Jeanette was raised to be a missionary. Books were not allowed at home unless they were religious books. As Mrs Winterson pointed out, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it till it’s too late.’ There were only 6 books in the house, including the Bible, and Cruden’s Concordance to the Bible. But there was another book – an accident, a chance – Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. These stories of the Grail, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Arthur and the Round Table became as central to Jeanette’s imagination as the Bible. Jeanette attended a girls’ grammar school – Accrington High School For Girls, and later read English at St Catherine’s College Oxford. In between, she was living in a Mini, driving an ice-cream van, working in a funeral parlour and falling in love. Her love affair with another girl at 16 meant that Jeanette had to leave home. Her mother asked her why she was still seeing this girl when she knew the consequences – homelessness. Jeanette replied – She makes me happy. Mrs Winterson’s response was, ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’ She was a violent philosopher. After Oxford Jeanette worked in the theatre for a while, at London’s The Roundhouse with the legendary Thelma Holt. ‘I did everything; wrote the programme notes, sold ice-cream, swept up, drove Thelma around, collated reviews and tried to sell advertising space to magazines like Time Out.’ In 1983, at a job interview at the newly formed Pandora Press (in the heyday of women’s presses in the UK), Jeanette started telling the boss interviewing her about her idea for a novel called Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. The boss was Philippa Brewster. She said, ‘If you write it the way you tell it, I’ll buy it.’ Jeanette didn’t get the job but she did write the novel and Oranges was published in 1985. Mrs Winterson said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve had to order a book in a false name.’ The novel was a word-of-mouth success round the independent bookshops. Then it won a few prizes and got picked up by the press. Suddenly it wasn’t in the Jams and Marmalades sections anymore. In 1994 Jeanette did two things; left London to live in the Cotswolds, where she still lives, and bought a derelict building in Spitalfields – London’s East End. At that time few people lived around the old fruit and veg market. Over 2 years Jeanette rebuilt her building, and later put a shop back on the ground floor where it had been, on and off, since 1810. The shop Verde’s is still owned by Jeanette, and run by Harvey Cabaniss, who has made it into a successful business. Jeanette says, ‘It is beautiful to look at and it is as asset to the neighbourhood – especially now when the whole place is becoming a corporate playground.’ If you want to read about Jeanette and her life, buy the memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? In 2009 Jeanette met Susie Orbach, psychoanalyst and author of the classics, Fat is a Feminist Issue and Impossibility of Sex. Susie had been separated from her partner of 34 years for 2 years, and Jeanette had also been 2 years out of a break up with the theatre director Deborah Warner. Susie and Jeanette began an unexpected and unlikely romance. They married in 2015. Jeanette continues to live in the Cotswolds. Susie continues to live in London. ‘There are so many ways of managing love and life. Be creative!’ Jeanette is also a Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Photography: Sam Churchill