Laura Sillars, Artistic Director, Site Gallery, Sheffield
Laura Sillars is the Artistic Director of Site Gallery, Sheffield. Previously, she was Programme Director for FACT (Liverpool). She was a Clore Leadership Fellow, mentored by James Lingwood, Co-Director of Artangel, who encouraged her to work with him to produce the company’s first US commission with one of the world’s most influential contemporary artists Mike Kelley – and she spent four months working with him in Detroit.
On her return to the UK, Laura moved to Sheffield to become Director of Site Gallery – a contemporary art gallery focusing on newly commissioned work and UK premieres, providing a base for international residencies and offering support to artists at critical moments in their careers.
Florian Kossak studied architecture at the Technical University Berlin and received an MArch from the University of Strathclyde in 1997. After a several year long collaboration with the Munich-based architect Otto Steidle he co-founded the workers’ co-operative GLAS – Glasgow Letters on Architecture and Space in 2001. In parallel, he has been teaching architecture and urbanism in the design studio and through history and theory courses since 1997, first at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, then Strathclyde University and, since 2006, at the University of Sheffield. In 2008 he received his PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art.
Dan Smith is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Having studied fine art in the early 1990s, he went on to develop a collaborative curatorial practice concerned with notions of collection and display under the name Wunderkammer. He has written extensively on contemporary art in publications such as Art Monthly, as well as engaging with theoretical approaches to notions of archive, material culture, science fiction and utopia. He lives in the North London suburb of Finchley.
After qualifying as an architect at the Bartlett School, UCL, Carolyn Butterworth joined van Heyningen and Haward Architects in London, becoming a director of the practice in 2000 and working on a variety of high profile educational and cultural buildings. She has taught on the MArch course since 2001 and, since 2003, practised in Sheffield, specialising in art/architecture projects.
Carolyn focuses on how teaching and the practice of architecture each informs the other. Her research is developed through practice and she actively encourages a methodology of action research in her teaching.
Source: www.sheffieldarchitecture.info
