Dr Sarah Cooke and Dr Alexandra Ross (Dr Ross was a postdoctoral fellow at the CCA last year). will be discussing various aspects of their curatorial practices, focusing on their recent contribution to the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival – a non-traditional electronic arts and media festival with an objective to not only showcase existing work, but to function as a location for making and interrogating digital cultures.

Held in Johannesburg from 6-16 September 2017, Dr Ross and Dr Cooke were part of a panel that discussed the complexities of curating art and technology within an African context.

Dr Sarah Cooke will also discuss her role as curator of the NEoN digital arts festival and of the LifeSpaces Science Art Research Gallery (Dundee), which engages artists and scientists in exciting new collaborations in order to foster long-term cross-disciplinary activity.

Dr Sarah Cook
University of Dundee and NEoN Digital Arts Festival

Sarah Cook is a curator, writer and Dundee Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design where she curates the programme for LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery and works as an associate curator with New Media Scotland and with Scotland’s only digital arts festival NEoN (North East of North).

She is editor of the book INFORMATION (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016) and is co-author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010; Chinese edition 2016). She co-edited with Sara Diamond Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (Banff Centre Press, 2011). She is the co-founder and co-editor of CRUMB, the longstanding online resource for curators of new media art.

She holds a Masters degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (NY), and a PhD from the University of Sunderland (2004). As part of her research funded by the AHRC, Sarah worked as adjunct curator of new media at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art until 2006, and in 2008 was the inaugural curatorial fellow at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York.

Dr Alexandra Ross
University of Glasgow

Alexandra Ross is Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curating at the University of Glasgow, also teaching on the M.Litt in Curating with Glasgow School of Art. She has taught and supervised at undergraduate and postgraduate level at universities throughout the UK and has recently been accepted on the advisory faculty of Transart Institute, New York.From 2015 to 2017 she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Centre for Curating the Archive, the University of Cape Town. Ross is a graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews and Dundee and holds a Doctorate in curatorship. She has also read an Honours law degree, a Masters in Museum and Gallery Studies and a Master of Fine Art. Forthcoming projects include a ‘Polyphonic Essay on Memory’ for NEoN Digital Arts Festival in November and she is also working on a publication on Dieter Roth and his time in Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland.