Research Area Leader - Art and Its Locations and Director, Research Institute Art and Design

Profile:

Management: Fine Art

Kerstin Mey FRSA, studied for an MA Art, and German language and literature in Berlin, Germany, obtained a PhD in art theory/aesthetics and gained a PGDip in European Cultural Policy and Administration. After positions in universities in Germany and the UK, she currently holds a Chair in Fine Art at the University of Ulster. She heads up the research area ‘Art and its Location’ in Interface: Centre for Research in Art, Technologies and Design. She is also the Director ofthe Research Institute Art and Design there.

Her research is concerned with contemporary cultural practices and their social and political situatedness in relation to the generation of place and communities. Of interest are: the role of art in civil society, art in the public domain, and the construction of identities under the influence of mass migration and digitisation, as well as the interconnections between art, documentation, archiving, memory and history writing. These issues are considered from cross-cultural, multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives and in relation to third level education. Currently, she is Artistic Director of ISEA 2009, the 15th Symposium on Electronic Art, hosted by the University of Ulster.

Her publications include:

As author and co-editor with Meike Krönke and Yvonne Spielmann, Kultureller Umbau:Räume, Identiäten und Repräsentationen, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2007.

‘Permutations: Site and Location, in: This Will Not Happen Without You, edited by Richard

Grayson and Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Newcastle 2007, pp. 192–195.

As author: Art and Obscenity, London and New York: IB Tauris, 2006.

Editor and contributor: On-Site/In-Sight, special issue Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vols. 4.1 and 4.2, December 2005

Co-editor with Yvonne Spielmann: Hybrid Identities in Digital Media, special issue Convergence. International Journal for Research in New Media, Winter 2005.

She was Member of the Core Group ‘Working in Public’: Public Art Research and Resource Scotland – Gray’s School of Art and Scottish Arts Council, 2007/8, and has joined the Belfast Healthy Urban Planning Group, and the Cathedral Quarter Steering Group.