Areas of interest: histories, theories and practices of photography; contemporary art; art history and theory; art writing; art criticism; post-internet art; post-digital art; photography and philosophy; photography and the essay; photography and computation; photography and AI; theories of visual intelligence and visual perception; the camera theory of vision; sociology of race/racism; critical philosophy of race; critical race theory; critical whiteness studies. 

Current areas of specialisation: colonialist photography; photography and orientalism; photography and racial slavery; photography and regimes of seeing; photography and racial whiteness; photography in contemporary art; photography and critical pedagogy; white complicity pedagogy; contemporary art and anti-colonialism; white self-criticality beyond anti-racism; white self-disclosure; white authorship; white ambush; white vigilance; race and visuality; the visual dimensions of white racial knowledge.

I hold degrees in Sound Arts and Design (BA Hons) from University of the Arts London and Communication Art and Design (MPhil) from the Royal College of Art. In 2024 I will complete a PhD in the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London.

I have taught at the University of Brighton since 2009 and in 2017 took up a permanent post as Lecturer in Photography. As of 2023 I teach across the School of Art and Media as Lecturer in Fine Art and Photography. From 2016-19 I was Visiting Lecturer in Historical and Critical Studies in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, in 2019 I was a Visiting Scholar at Yale University, and in 2022 I delivered a Carmen Mortensen Endowed Lecture as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Utah. Since 2009 I have worked in various lecturing and tutoring roles internationally, at Camberwell College of Arts, Coventry University, Royal Academy of Art The Hague, University of Copenhagen, University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, Photography Studies College Melbourne, King's College London and University of Oxford.

I have contributed to publications including 1000 Words, Aperture, Foam, frieze, Granta, The Guardian, Philosophy of Photography, Photography and Culture, Photoworks, Vogue Italia, and exhibition catalogues and scholarly books from Manchester Art Gallery, UCL Art Museum, Art Museum of Estonia, FOMU Belgium, the Australian Centre for Photography, Routledge and Rowman & Littlefield. I have presented research publicly at institutions including Tate Modern, MoMA PS1, Yale Centre for British Art and Open Eye Gallery Liverpool. 

My first edited book, The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization, was published by SPBH Editions and Art on the Underground in 2019, with a second edition published in 2022. I am currently working on a monograph provisionally titled Photography’s White Racial Frame (Bloomsbury Philosophy, forthcoming).

My art practice is informed by long term research projects and includes photogaphy, drawing, text, sound and performance. In this I hope to parody, humourise and critique commonly consumed, sensed or technologised objects usually taken for granted, revealing the strange ways their meanings are bound up in social systems such as racial whiteness, exoticism and bourgeois taste. I have presented work at University of Brighton, Vogue Photo Festival, Frieze London and Tate Britain. 

I have experience producing research and publications for large public arts institutions and small galleries. From 2006-09 I was curator at the Grade I listed Fulham Palace, and from 2012-19 I worked in Education and as Editor at The Photographers’ Gallery, programming talks and events, and commissioning and editing writing both online and in print. From 2013-15 I co-curated Chandelier, a collaborative project space in the studio of artist Karen Knorr. I have also presented my research and writing at Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art New York, Yale Centre for British Art and Open Eye Gallery Liverpool. Some of this work has been funded by Arts Council England, The Elephant Trust and Art on the Underground/Mayor of London.

My teaching draws from methods in student-centred learning, divergent and dialogical teaching. I attempt to dismantle teacher-student hierarchies and instead position learning as the process of both teacher and student changing their minds and learning from one another through meaningful educational encounters.