Sir Christopher Frayling is Rector of the Royal College of Art, the only wholly postgraduate university institution of art and design in the world, and also Professor of Cultural History there. In addition, he is Chairman of Arts Council England, the largest funding body for the arts in the UK; he is the longest-serving Trustee of the V&A (since 1983) and Chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, which selects the designs for new coins. He has in the recent past been Chairman of the Design Council, Chairman of the Crafts Study Centre and a Governor of the British Film Institute. He was a founder-member of the Arts & Humanities Research Board, now the Arts & Humanities Research Council – for which he campaigned. Christopher is well-known as an historian, critic and an award-winning broadcaster, with his work appearing regularly on network radio and television. He has published seventeen books and numerous articles on contemporary art, design, film and the history of ideas. Christopher has been, for as long as he can remember, a passionate campaigner for the importance of the creative industries, and of arts education. On New Year’s Eve 2000, he was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for “services to art and design education”.
Christopher Frayling is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and the BBC World Service. His six-part television series about advertising, The Art of Persuasion, for Channel 4, won a Gold Medal at the New York Film and Television Festival. His historical play for Radio 4 – The Rime of the Bounty – was awarded a Sony Radio Award/Society of Authors Award for ‘best original script’ in 1990. His five-part television series for BBC2 (with the A&E network), The Face of Tutankhamun, was critically acclaimed as “an adventure worthy of Spielberg” and achieved excellent viewing figures. His follow-up, five-part series for BBC2 , was screened in summer 1995. This was followed at Christmas 1996 by a major four-part BBC1 television series, called 'Nightmare' – the birth of horror (also with A&E), which attracted excellent audiences and critical notices. These three series have been broadcast all over the world. He has since made several documentaries as DVD ‘special features’.
Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, UK, where she teaches and researches feminist theatre, theory and performance, a field in which she is widely published. Her authored studies include Sarah Bernhardt: A French Actress on the English Stage (1989); Theatre as Sign-System (1991, with George Savona); An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1995); Caryl Churchill (1997/ 2001); Feminist Theatre Practice (1999) and Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003). Her edited work includes four volumes of plays by women; The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000, with Janelle Reinelt); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (2006, with Geraldine Harris), and Staging International Feminisms (2007, with Sue-Ellen Case). Her most recent monograph is Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary [Women] Practitioners (2008, with Geraldine Harris). From 2003 to 2006 she was the principal investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Women’s Writing for Performance Project’ (www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/theatre/womenwriting), and currently serves as editor of Theatre Research International.
Darren Newbury is Professor of Photography at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University. He has a background in photography and cultural studies and completed his PhD on photography and education in 1995. He has been involved in doctoral education and training in art and design since the mid-1990s and is responsible for the Research Training Initiative (RTI), a project developing and publishing research training resources for postgraduates in art and design (www.biad.bcu.ac.uk/research/rti/). The outcomes of the project have been disseminated through papers at national and international conferences and workshops, including the US (2001), India (1999), South Africa (2002) and Sweden (2006), and refereed journal articles (Journal of Graduate Education, Active Learning, Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education). In 2006, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), he led a collaborative research training project on research ethics in art, design and media. He has also been involved in the AHRC funding peer review process, as a Peer Review College member, Postgraduate Panel member and convener, and Postgraduate Committee member.
Professor Newbury has a long-standing research interest in photography, photographic education and visual research methods. He has published widely in these areas, with papers in journals including: Disability and Society; Journal of Art and Design Education; Journalism Studies; Visual Anthropology; British Journal of Sociology of Education; The Curriculum Journal; Visual Anthropology Review; Visual Communication; Visual Culture in Britain; Visual Studies. He is also current editor of the international journal Visual Studies (since 2003). His most recent research has focused on the development of photography in apartheid South Africa and the re-use of historical images as a form of memorialisation in contemporary post-apartheid displays. This project has involved fieldwork, interviews and archival research in South Africa, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, and has been supported by two AHRC awards. His book on the subject was published as Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa by the University of South Africa (UNISA) Press in 2009.
Dr. Darlie Koshy is the Director General (Education & Training) of the Apparel Export Promotion Council (sponsored by the Ministry of Textiles, GOI) and is headquartered at the Apparel House, Sector-44, Gurgaon (NCR) and is responsible for all Education, Training, Research and Consultancy initiatives of AEPC across India and Overseas. He is the CEO for all the Apparel Training & Design Centres across the country and the Institutes of Apparel Management in Gurgaon and Mumbai.
Dr. Darlie O Koshy was the Director of NID (Principal Admn. & Academic Officer) and member of the Governing Council between 5 June 2000 and 26 October 2008. During his tenure, he was involved in a major transformation of NID. Dr. Koshy spearheaded the promotion of “Designed in India, Made for the World” through a series of pioneering efforts like CII-NID design Summit (since 2001), Businessworld-NID Design Excellence Awards (since 2003), NID-ITPO Showcase Design (since 2002) and initiatives with the world bodies of design like ICSID (since 2001) and the initiative of setting up of NDBI (2002) and Design Idea Fair (2006, 2007), etc. The first National Design Policy was initiated and drafted by Dr. Darlie Koshy which was subsequently approved by the Government of India in February 2007.
Dr. Koshy is the author of three pioneering books on International Marketing and Design Management, two monographs and about 100 papers and has made over 200 presentations, in India and overseas. Dr. Koshy’s recent book, Indian Design Edge: Strategies for Success in the Creative Economy, published by M/s. Roli Books, New Delhi, was released all over India during September 2008 and has received enthusiastic response and acclaim. (visit www.darliekoshy.com).
Dr. Koshy’s contribution to design education and promotion has been recognized by being named as one of “50 leaders reshaping Indian education” by Education World, The Human Development Magazine (Nov. 2008) and has also been felicitated with the B M Das Memorial Citation in 2006 by CLRI, Chennai for his contribution “to the generation and development of knowledge as an applied researcher”. Dr. Koshy also received the Delhi IIT Alumni Award for contribution of National Development in 2008 apart from “Premio II Ponte 2008 Award” for contribution to the Design for Development and Quality of Life instituted by the Fondazione Europea Guido Venosta, Milan Italy.
Educated at the Royal College of Art, Professor Bruce Brown is currently Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Brighton and before that, for nineteen years, was Dean of the university’s Faculty of Arts & Architecture. Most recently he chaired the RAE2008 Main Panel O with responsibility for: Art and Design; History of Art, Architecture and Design; Drama, Dance and Performing Arts; Cultural, Communication and Media Studies; and Music. He was a founding member of the AHRB’s post-graduate panel for Visual Arts (1998-2000) and has served on the executive committee of the UK Council for Graduate Education (2000-2004). Since 1991 he has been a member of the Hong Kong Council for Academic Accreditation chairing many events in the territory and in January 2009 will participate in an international panel of four persons advising the Secretary of State for Portugal on the development of Higher Education and Research in the Arts.
Other advisory roles concerned with research in the arts and humanities have included the Qatar National Research Foundation (2006-), Riksbanken Jubileumsfond in Stockholm (2007-), the Flemish Ministry of Education (2006) and individual organisations such as the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans (2007), Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien (2008), Artesis Hogeschool Antwerpen (2008) and Universiteit Gent (2008). He is presently a member of the governing bodies of the University of Brighton and Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv, Israel; is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and an editor of Design Issues research journal published by MIT press (2006-). His own research is in the area of visual memory and has resulted in papers and presentations in the US, Portugal, Israel, Norway, Korea, Japan and Germany.
Anne Burdick is the Chair of the Graduate Media Design Program (MDP) at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. The MDP is concerned with inventing new practices for design in emerging communication contexts - in other words, preparing designers for jobs that do not yet exist. As a designer, a design critic, and a long-time educator, Anne is dedicated to developing research within graduate level design education in an American context and defining the future of design as both a discipline and a practice. In addition to teaching full-time at Art Center for over ten years, she has also taught at California Institute of the Arts, North Carolina State University, and Otis College of Art and Design, and run her own studio, The Offices of Anne Burdick. She received her MFA and BFA from California Institute of the Arts.
Anne Burdick's research looks at the relationship between language, technology, and cultural practices in the visible form and structure of writing. Anne designs new modes of scholarship in collaboration with computational linguists, experimental fiction writers, and literary scholars. In 2000, she won the prestigious Leipzig Award for the “Most Beautiful Book in the World” for the Fackel Wörterbuch: Redensarten, an unconventional text-dictionary with the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She has been the design editor of Electronic Book Review http://electronicbookreview.com since 1995, and since 2000 has collaborated on the Austrian Academy Corpus (AAC), an online database of nineteenth and twentieth century German language texts that sits at the intersection of computational linguistics and cultural theory. Her projects are wide-ranging: poetry installations for the Getty Research Institute; electronic literature and net.art at the Walker Art Center’s Gallery 9; and books of literary/media criticism by authors such as Marshall McLuhan and N. Katherine Hayles. Most recently, with faculty and students of the MDP, Anne designed and developed 'The New Ecology of Things' (N.E.T.), a "transmedia publication" comprised of a book, poster, mobile phone content and a website, each of which connects to the others. The project asks the question: in an era of ubiquitous computing, what happens when every object and space has a life of its own?
Anne's work and writing are recognized and exhibited internationally, seen most recently in Women in Design: Influence and Inspiration From the Original Trailblazers to the New Groundbreakers and the California Design Biennial. She has been featured in Eye Magazine (UK), Electronic Book Review, Émigré Magazine, IDEA (Japan) and I.D. Magazine, among others, and has won numerous top awards over the last 20 years. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is part of the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Anne lectures about issues in design and design education worldwide. She sits on the advisory board for the Design-Based Learning Lab and PETLab, a MacArthur Digital-Learning project. She is a participant in Vectors and HASTAC, and has been invited to join the AGI (Alliance Graphique International).
