Joyful Militancy and Protest: RE/SISTERS Talks

Maggie Murray and Val Wilmer set up Format Photographers, the co-operative agency for women, in 1983. She was a social documentary photographer who covered issues in Britain and abroad. Her work appeared widely in books, magazines and exhibitions - much of it inspired by her broadly socialist and feminist perspective. During the 1970s she was a member of The Hackney Flashers agitprop, mixed media collective. Her archive is at Bishopsgate Institute in London and in National Portrait Gallery and Arts Council of England collections.

Anna Feigenbaum is a Professor in Digital Storytelling at Bournemouth University where she co-directs the Centre for Science, Health and Data Communication Research. She is the author of Tear Gas: From WWI to the Streets of Today, a co-author of Protest Camps, co-editor of Protest Camps in an International Context, and has written extensively on Greenham Common and place- based activisms.

Poulomi Basu is a Indian neurodiverse artist and activist who now lives and works in London, UK. Basu’s work forms part of public collections at various venues, including the V&A (UK), Harvard Art Museums (USA),Autograph (UK), the Museum of Modern Art, Special Collections (USA), the Martin Parr Foundation (UK), Rencontres d’Arles (FR) and The Olympic Museum (CH).

Dr Noni Stacey is Practice Supervisor for Writing on the MA Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). Her latest book, ‘Leave to Remain, A Snapshot of Brexit’, is published by Lund Humphries (2023). Her first book, ‘Photography of Protest and Community: The Radical Collectives of the 1970s’, was published in 2020. 

Nina Wakeford is an artist based in London and teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Through performance, props and moving image, she addresses the way in which identification and disidentification are forged, modes of empathy and inhabitation, and the risks of staying loyal/respectful to the kinds of materials that initiate her artwork - mostly from feminist, LGBT and queer archives. 

Jane England is an art historian, gallery director/curator and photographer, committed to working with artists’ archives and researching and curating retrospective exhibitions and explorations of 20th century art history. She founded England & Co gallery in 1987, which has established an independent identity reflecting its historically aware, research-based curatorial approach.

Melanie Friend was a member of Format photographers from 1986 to 2003. She worked as a photojournalist in the UK and overseas in the 1980s and 1990s, before moving to longer term UK-based documentary and landscape projects.  

Joanne O’Brien has been a photographer for 40 years and is best known for her portraiture and documentary work. She has worked in China, the USA, the Middle East and Europe. Her work is in the National Portrait Gallery collection, London.