Dr Naomi Pearce

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working across fiction, art writing and performance practice. I trained as a visual artist and spent the mid-2000s co-running a studio and gallery project in Bermondsey, South London. This experience led me to become interested in the history, politics and gender dynamics of artist-led initiatives, subjects I examined during a practice-based PhD at Edinburgh University. 

My debut novel Innominate explored the undervalued and forgotten work of women administrators in London’s artist-led organizations of the 1970s and was published by the small press, MOIST, in 2023. The book received praise from Bhanu Kapil and Juliet Jacques, with Iain Sinclair describing it as 'a classic of local archaeology, lifting the particulars of place and persons into the dimension of a driven and crafted poetic.' 

My writing draws on feminist art history, site-specific practice, literature and theory. My research on affective and embodied archival methods has been published in ‘Gestures: A Body of Work’, Manchester University Press and a special issue of the British Art Studies journal ‘Queer Art in Britain Since the 1980s’, both 2025. 

I am motivated by the creative possibilities of ‘working things out in public’ either through live performance or the curation of exhibition and events, often collaborating with other artists. My projects have been presented nationally and internationally including The Warburg Institute, London; Chapter, Cardiff; Tramway, Scotland; Turner Contemporary, Margate and San Serriffe, Amsterdam. 

I teach broadly on contemporary art and curatorial practice; feminist art history; critical theory and interdisciplinary research methodologies.