Meet the Exhibition co-Curator: Sean Curran

Sean Curran:

I am currently writing up my AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) funded practice-based PhD at the UCL Institute of Education. My research is based on my curatorial practice, specifically with my two exhibitions at the National Trust property Sutton House in Hackney, ‘Master-Mistress’ (Feb 2014) and ‘126’ (Feb 2015). Both exhibitions use contemporary LGBTQ voices to re-interpret Shakespeare’s fair youth sonnets. I have also exhibited at the V&A’s first ever LGBTQ themed Friday Late ‘Queer and Now’ (February 2015). My curatorial style lends from LGBTQ activism and queer DIY aesthetics. I am Exhibition Consultant for the London Metropolitan Archives’ (LMA) upcoming LGBTQ exhibition Speak Out! and have been part of the steering committee for the LMA annual LGBTQ History and Archives Conference since 2012.  I have volunteered with the National Trust since 2013, including on the London Project’s pop-up tours of the Big Brother house and Balfon Tower in Poplar, East London. I have spoken at conferences around the world about LGBTQ interventions in museums and historic buildings, including in Amsterdam, New York and Taipei. My last publication was about collecting and exhibiting LGBTQ oral his and her-stories, and featured in On Sexuality: Collecting everybody’s experience, published by MuseumsEtc in 2015. I currently work in a school in Hackney.