Loraine Leeson

Dr. Loraine Leeson is a visual artist who works through social engagement. This specialism underpins her role teaching Social Practice in Department of Visual Arts, including the exit degree Fine Art Social Practice. It also informed her previous appointment as Fulbright Scholar in Residence at University of Washington Tacoma, where she introduced community engagement into its programmes, and as Senior Research Fellow at University of Westminster. Loraine is director of the arts charity cSPACE and chair of Four Corners centre for photography, film and video. She is particularly known for her work in support of the campaigning communities of London’s Docklands in the 1980’s, and her later use of digital media and the Internet to explore collective creativity, while her research focuses on the use of art to influence social change through bringing community-based knowledge into the public domain. A retrospective exhibition celebrating thirty years of her practice toured Berlin, London, Toronto and Dublin 2005-08. More recent exhibitions have included a group show at Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid on the reinvention of documentary and a solo show of collaborative photomontage work in support of health campaigns at ICA London in 2017, a year which also saw the initial publication of her monograph Art: Process: Change with Routledge. Loraine’s participatory art practice has been recognised through a Media Trust Inspiring Voices award and Olympic Inspire Mark, while her public artwork The Catch involving three hundred children became a London 2012 Landmark. Her Active Energy project, which received the 2016 RegenSW Arts and Green Energy award, was submitted as an impact case study in REF 2021 and has been shortlisted in 2022 for the Times Higher Education award in Knowledge Exchange. Other recent funded research has included an interdisciplinary project in India addressing issues of water shortage in desert regions, another involving puppeteers and art therapists supporting children who have suffered from the conflict in Kashmir, and a collaboration with planners and social scientists investigating histories of community-led planning. A current project she is leading involving the Tate Gallery and partners Queens Museum and City University New York, is investigating how the teaching of social practice can be enhanced by collaboration between HE and arts institutions, and through international cooperation.