Academic staff profile Dr Lucy Steeds

Lucy Steeds is responsible for undergraduate courses that complement the Art Practice strand, centring thinking about contemporary art and ideas. As a part of this but more specifically, she is course organiser for Exhibiting at Large as Contemporary Artists (Stage 3), which explores how art crosses or spans contexts.

Lucy teaches – and supports ECA colleagues to teach – ethics as a core part of research design.

She is co-lead, with David Farrier and Andrew Patrizio, of the Edinburgh Cluster for the EARTH scholarships supported by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities and the British Council.

Lucy Steeds researches the exhibition of contemporary art, historically and around the world, where this is useful to reflect on here and now. She understands ‘exhibition’ in an expanded sense, as taking on myriad forms and without necessarily privileging the museum, gallery or biennial as host. She is interested in how contemporary art is shared and discussed, seeking to learn from eclectic practices and experiences.

As a Series Editor for the ‘Exhibition Histories’ books, Lucy has collaborated with authors, artists, curators and organisations across Europe and in Africa, the Americas and Asia. Together with Bo Choy, Charles Esche and David Morris, she co-edited the twelfth volume in the series, Art and Its Worlds: Exhibitions, Institutions and Art Becoming Public (2021). With other collaborators, Lucy has co-edited a trilogy of books about the presentation and mediation of contemporary art: The Curatorial Conundrum (2016), How Institutions Think (2017) and Curating after the Global (2019, all MIT Press). She is responsible for Exhibition in the ‘Documents of Contemporary Art’ series (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2014).

Lucy is currently exploring an approach to art that focuses on its ecological exposure. This encourages attention to the vulnerabilities and interconnectedness of planetary life, while highlighting how art is both implicated and can implicate those it convenes. She has written on this topic for Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (vol.49, no.3, September 2022) and MODOS: Revista de História da arte (vol.7, no.4, February 2023).