Lead supervisor:
Dr Tom Allbeson 
Other supervisor(s):
- Dr Alix Beeston
Start date: October 2025 (Full time)
Award: Collaborative
Subject Pathway:
Journalism, Digital Media and Democracy
Thematic Cluster:
Rights and Governance Cluster
In partnership with:
The Valleys Archive at Ffotogallery: Community, Photography & Democracy in South Wales, 1978-2028
Between 1984 and 1990, Cardiff's Ffotogallery worked with 10 photographers to 'record and interpret aspects of the South Wales Valleys'. Photographers were commissioned to respond to their 'personal experience', 'curiosity', 'affection' or 'disenchantment'. First shown at the gallery in a series of exhibitions, the resulting 450 photographs have recently been digitised as the Valleys Project.
Through visual analysis, research into published writings, and interviews with artists and subjects, my research seeks to build a more complete story of the collection, helping facilitate deeper engagement with individual works. This research should help audiences discern what these images meant to photographic, artworld and Valleys' communities in the 1980s and encourage consideration of their relevance today. It also seeks to write these images into British Art History.
Drawing on theoretical texts alongside qualitative research, I research will explore what these photographs, conceived as artworks, reveal about photographic practice in Wales and how they re/present the communities they document. I will consider the socio-political context in which these bodies of work were produced, the role of commissioning bodies in subject choices, the intentions of the photographers and the experiences of the subjects. What stories do these images tell about the South Wales Valleys, who is and isn't included, and how has 'meaning' been derived?
Biography
Before starting my PhD, I spent 15 years working in the gallery and museum sector, most recently as a curator in the Research and Interpretation department at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. At Tate, I researched, wrote and edited short-form texts for non-specialist arts audiences and developed organisation-wide strategies and resources to support the creation of more inclusive content. I have particular expertise supporting audience engagement with sensitive artworks and contested histories. This expertise was developed during my work on dozens of exhibitions and displays, including Conflict, Time, Photography (Tate Modern, 2014), Don McCullin (Tate Britain, 2018), Life Between Islands (Tate Britain, 2021), A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography (Tate Modern, 2023), Women in Revolt! (Tate Britain, 2023), Keith Piper x Rex Whistler (Tate Britain, 2024), Lee Miller (Tate Britain, 2025).
From 2018 to 2024, I was an associate lecturer on the MA Curating course at Courtauld Institute of Art, and I have been a trustee of Photo Oxford since 2024.
I have a BA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA from the University of Liverpool’s Philosophy Department, where my research focused on aesthetics, photographic theory and histories of documentary practice.