Fine Art BA Honours

Overview

Why study Fine Art BA at Middlesex

Join a diverse creative community where learning and teaching extend from the studio to a professional network of leading art professionals in London and beyond.

What you will gain

This programme equips you with the knowledge, skills, experience, and resilience required to establish a sustainable career in the field of contemporary art and creative industries post-graduation. You will also gain a range of transferable skills, including practical and technological fabrication, visual and digital literacy, intellectual agility, and creative problem-solving.

What you will learn

Your studies will be a combination of studio practice, professional studies, and critical approaches to art and visual culture.

As well as developing your critical and creative skills, you'll graduate with a range of transferable skills which prepare you for a range of careers. Many of our graduates have gone on to work as curators, art therapists, researchers, writers, photographers, and more.

In addition to our incredible facilities on campus, you will be within easy access of London's thriving art scene.

By joining us on this course, you'll have the chance to:

Learn from groundbreaking artists and writers with international profiles, including Keith Piper, founder of BLK Art Group, social art practice pioneer Loraine Leeson, art critic and feminist art expert Katy Deepwell, and renowned multimedia artist Ergin Cavusoglu.
Make use of our outstanding facilities in the Grove, our specialist building for art, design, media and performing arts.
Develop a critical understanding of visual culture and art's place within it.
Enhance your employability by holding a work placement at an artistic or educational organisation.

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Student work

Each year, students from BA Fine Art participate in group exhibitions either online or in a physical spaces, where possible these include external gallery events.

Course content

Year 1

In full-time mode, your first year focuses on understanding and working with different models as a fine artist, ensuring you have exposure to all the different workshops and facilities available to you.

You will be supported towards establishing a self-directed practice, namely identifying, resourcing, and making work independently.
You will be introduced to a range of media, their capacities, histories, and implications.
You will be introduced to global visual cultures and their fruitful intersections with artistic practices.
You will begin to orient yourself within art’s complex ecologies.

Year 2

In your second year, you will diversify and expand your skills, developing a deeper awareness of the critical demands of contemporary art.

You will develop your visual and material language as you experiment in your studio practice.
You will explore key concepts and debates in global art, using research and writing to begin to consolidate your thinking and situate your practice in contemporary contexts.
This year includes options to study on the international exchange programme.
You will gain hands-on experience of curating and exhibiting.
You will continue your investigation into art’s ecologies by undertaking and reflecting on a short placement.

Year 3

The final year of your degree enables you to consolidate and refine your art, developing your practice to a professional level.

You will gain confidence in presenting your work professionally, using purposefully chosen platforms and media, in preparation for a career in the arts.
Your research into art and visual culture becomes self-directed, giving you the opportunity to research a topic of your choice under expert supervision.
You will continue to gain hands-on experience of curating and exhibiting, culminating in your degree show.

Modules

Year 1 - Compulsory
- Establishing a self-directed practice (30 credits)
  The module aims to:
  - Support students to refine a specialist approach that is underpinned by in depth awareness of research, contexts, processes or technologies relevant to their chosen area.
  - Provide students with the opportunity to fully integrate conceptual, critical, formal, material, technical and theoretical interests and skills through practice and documentation.
  - Shed light on the creative and critical potential of exploring relationships between practice, strategies of exhibition and display, and audience, ranging from individual studio-based practices through to the site-specific, collaborative or participatory, and from gallery-oriented to socially-engaged contexts.
  - Apply and communicate an informed and research-led approach to practice, processes and contexts through documenting their learning, experimentation and progress.
- Introduction to Media, Sites and Situations (30 credits)
  This module aims to:
  - Introduce students to the key specialist pathways that make up multi- disciplined fine art practice, including critical practice, social art practice, drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, multi-media practice, film and sound.
  - Support students to establish an art practice through material, technical and conceptual exploration.
  - Introduce students to the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and broader social, political and community contexts.
  - Encourage the application of an imaginative and adventurous approach to specialist media materials, ideas, and process relevant to art practice.
  - Foster the flexible and imaginative application of skills & knowledge to a variety of contexts, both individually & collaboratively.
  - Introduce research as the basis for creative and critical practice.
- Art Ecologies: Orientation (30 credits)
  This module aims to:
  - Introduce students to the so-called art world as an open system of interdependent structures and agents, in which they are already participants
  - Broaden students’ critical knowledge of how contemporary Fine Art is produced, distributed, mediated and curated.
  - Support each student’s individual ability to begin constructing a critically reflexive sense of self as a developing artist.
  - Empower students to claim a place in contemporary art ecologies.
- Art and Visual Culture (30 credits)
  This module aims to:
  - Introduce the broad realm of today’s global visual cultures and their encounters with artistic practices.
  - Critically explore intersectionality and interdisciplinarity through specific instances of how vision, knowledge and power intersect.
  - Provide students with knowledge and skills to locate themselves between history and the present, critically negotiating their own place within the social and political realities that surround the making of art.
  - Support students towards developing their own research and intellectual work as part of intentional communities of practice.
  - Contextualise contemporary practice within historical contexts and visual culture’s regimes of representation, genres, and tropes.
Year 2 - Compulsory
- Developing a self-directed practice (30 credits)
  The module aims to:
  - Initiate the development of individual art practices where ideas are explored through a range of making processes.
  - Help students establish a working momentum and develop as confident, reflective practitioners within the studio environment.
  - Support students to critically engage with practice and grow their confidence to contribute to peer discussions of their emergent practices.
  - Equip students with the ability to resolve the work they make in the studio, for public viewing, maintaining an exploratory and experimental approach.
  - Encourage students to engage with and value a range of processes and record their work in progress, maintaining documentation that reflects their development.
- Media, Sites and Situations (30 credits)
  This module aims to:
  - Further develop students’ practice through the key specialist pathways that make up multi-disciplined fine art practice, including critical practice, social art practice, drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, multi-media practice, film and sound.
  - Foster a deeper understanding of the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and the broader social, political and community contexts through their personal artistic development.
  - Support students to apply further specialist skills & knowledge flexibly and imaginatively to a variety of contexts, both as an individual & collaboratively as a team.
  - Build students’ confidence as researchers into, around, and for art practice.
- Art Ecologies: Placement (30 credits)
  
  This module builds on FNA1303’s introduction to art’s ecologies by putting a mostly theoretical engagement with different art organisations and different contexts of artistic labour to practice. We will learn from past (Artists’ Placement Agency) and evolving (Arte Util) examples of social art practice, in order to support each student to take an inventory of the unique toolkit that being an artist brings to the world of work. Students are supported in researching, holding, and reflecting on a short placement that could be either at an art’s organisation or another organisation that would stand to benefit from input from an artist.
- Research and Critical Analysis (30 credits)
  - Develop students’ understanding of the histories and debates that define contemporary art worlds in their local/global dimensions.
  - explore the field of Contemporary Fine Art practice, its core concepts, histories and institutional realities by looking closely at the production, reception, and intention, as well as economic, social, and ideological aspects
  - delve into the critical understandings of race, class, sex, gender and sexuality introduced in FNA1930 into greater depth, conceived here as factors within the global developments of ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ art.
  - In dialogue with FNA2203, examine recent artistic investigations of medium (and the ‘post-medium’ condition), exploring the diverse forms that contemporary art practice takes.
  - Investigate art’s globalisation and the ongoing development of digital and analogue media for representation and the circulation of images.
  - Support students to further develop and expand their research skills and methods, in preparation for FNA3903.
Year 3 - Compulsory
- Self-Directed Practice and Making Public (60 credits)
  The module aims to:
  - Enable students to consolidate and reflect on their practice while developing the transferable skill of independent learning.
  - Guide students in constructing a learning process distinctive to their own practice by drawing on a range of research methods and a range of conceptualisation and making strategies.
  - Encourage students to extend their engagement with contemporary art practice through encounters with a range of practices, discourses and contexts
  - Support students in becoming discerning, ethically oriented, and critically engaged practitioners, able to engage in contemporary debates surrounding art and cultures, making links across modules and disciplines
  - Encourage students to engage with and value process, supporting materials documentation and reflection in developing a body of work
  - Support students in developing and co-curating a substantial and coherent exhibition of work for assessment.
- Working in the Arts (30 credits)
  This module represents the culmination of your exploration with art’s complex ecologies and aims to prepare students for entering the arts industries as a graduate of BA Fine Art and qualified, professional, art workers. It aims to:
  - Furnish students with the knowledge and skills to launch their career, from advice on funding to forging a creative CV and the right web presence.
  - Help students clarify the role that they want their practice and labour to play in art’s ecologies and in wider society, locally and globally.
  - Empower students to manage how their work could and should be seen, interpreted and understood by different audiences.
  - Examine questions of curating, displaying and disseminating students’ own practice and other contemporary art practices.
  - Explore how audiences engage with contemporary art practices, through analysis of field trips, exhibition visits, presentations and texts.
  - Guide students to produce appropriate documentation of their practice for both personal/developmental and professional/promotional uses.
- Self-Directed Research and Thesis (30 credits)
  
  This module aims to enable students to identify and deliver a formal extended thesis, presented according to academic conventions. This will be the product of sustained and creative engagement with a range of research resources, on and offline, and it offers the chance to develop an in-depth understanding of an area of visual culture or contemporary art of relevance either to the student’s own studio-practice or their broader cultural and artistic interests. Students will be encouraged to use writing in a creative and purposive way, and to explore the broad possibilities of the form of the essay.

More information about this course

To find out more about this highly regarded course, please download the full specification.

Course specification

We review our courses regularly to improve your experience and graduate prospects so modules may be subject to change.

Teaching

How we'll teach you

You'll be taught by qualified academics with a wealth of pedagogical experience and expertise. Our teaching team includes academics, professional practitioners, and technical staff. Graduate academic assistants or trained postgraduate research students may also have input into your teaching under the supervision of the module leader. Our teaching and learning strategy includes:

Workshops: to introduce methods of fabrication, practice skills, and support development
Lectures and briefings: to present information, case studies, critical concepts, theories, and debates
Seminars: to test ideas, promote critical discussion, hone communication skills, and support peer-learning
Field trips: to introduce new ideas and practices, support research and peer-learning, and promote critical discussion
Set and self-directed reading and research: to extend theoretical and practical knowledge
Individual tutorials: to discuss, support, and provide feedback on research and development
Peer and self-evaluation: to develop critical skills, support peer-learning, encourage reflection, and help set goals
Invited talks: to gain insights from professionals in the field

Your learning is supported through a virtual learning environment as well as a range of services, including dedicated subject librarians, academic writing and language tutors, and initiatives including the Student Learning Assistants (SLAs), experienced students who have been identified by their tutors as being highly motivated and capable learners who "have been there before" and know the typical academic issues new students face in their studies.

We review and update our courses regularly to ensure we are teaching the most relevant course and using the most innovative ways of learning. You’ll have access to a range of teaching styles, developed by academics who are experts in their fields.

Study breakdown

Your learning on this course is measured and recognised in credits, with each credit being equal to approximately 10 hours of notional learning. In full-time mode, you will complete 120 credits for each of three years of study, amounting to 360 credits in total. Each year's 120 credits are broken down into modules of typically 30 credits.

Year 1 - weekly timetable

During your first year in full-time mode, your weekly timetable will typically consist of four 2.5-hour taught sessions, which will consist of lectures, seminars and group tutorials, individual tutorials, and workshop inductions, demonstrations, and guided activities. Please note that some individual tutorials and workshops may be scheduled in different slots, depending on availability.

MONDAY	TUESDAY	WEDNESDAY	THURSDAY	FRIDAY
Art and visual culture lecture and seminar	Studio teachings and workshops	Professional practice seminar	Studio teaching and workshops	Independent practice
Independent study Optional life drawing class	Crits and tutorials	Invited speakers	Crits and tutorials	Independent practice

Independent Learning
Outside of teaching hours, you’ll learn independently through self-directed practice and study, which will involve developing your art practice, visiting exhibitions, reading articles and books, working on projects, undertaking research, and preparing for assessments including exhibitions, coursework, and presentations.
Your independent learning is supported by the library and study hub, laptop hire, and with online materials in MyUniHub.
Teaching vs independent learning
Here is an indication of how you will split your time.
Year 1
Percentage Hours Typical activity
30% 360 Teaching, learning and assessment
70% 840 Independent learning
Year 2
Percentage Hours Typical activity
30% 360 Teaching, learning and assessment
70% 840 Independent learning
Year 3
Percentage Hours Typical activity
25% 300 Teaching, learning and assessment
75% 900 Independent learning
Assessment and feedback
Assessment is entirely through coursework, with no exams. You will exhibit and document your work and will also be assessed through sketchbooks, presentations, and written work.
We'll test your understanding and progress by formative assessment, which takes place at least once per module, after which you'll receive feedback and guidance for future development from your tutor. Formative assessment also takes place at all tutorial opportunities and is integral to your learning, but does not count towards your module grade.
There are formal assessments, known as summative assessments for each module, usually at the end, which will count towards your module final marks.
Assessments are reviewed annually and may be updated based on student feedback or feedback from an external examiner.
Year Coursework Exams% Practical Exams%
Year 1 100%
Year 2 100%
Year 3 100%

Percentage	Hours	Typical activity
30%	360	Teaching, learning and assessment
70%	840	Independent learning

Percentage	Hours	Typical activity
30%	360	Teaching, learning and assessment
70%	840	Independent learning

Percentage	Hours	Typical activity
25%	300	Teaching, learning and assessment
75%	900	Independent learning

Year	Coursework	Exams%	Practical Exams%
Year 1	100%
Year 2	100%
Year 3	100%

Entry requirements

At Middlesex, we're proud of how we recognise the potential of future students like you. An assessment of your portfolio is the most important criterion for admission to the programme of Fine Art BA Honours.

We’ll always be as flexible as possible and take into consideration any barriers you may have faced in your learning. And, if you don’t quite get the grades you hoped for, we’ll also look at more than your qualifications. Things like your work experience, other achievements and your personal statement.

Qualifications

We accept applications from students with a wide range of qualifications, including combinations of qualifications. The requirements for our most common entry qualifications can be found below:

112-128 UCAS Tariff Points

A Levels	BBC-BBB
BTEC	DMM-DDM
Access requirements	Overall pass: must include 45 credits at level 3, of which all 45 must be at Merit or higher
Combinations	A combination of A-Level, BTEC and other accepted qualifications that total 112 - 128 UCAS Tariff points

Our general entry requirements page outlines how we make offers where we have given a range (e.g. BBB – BBC in A levels), and how you will be made an offer if you are studying a combination of qualifications (e.g. BTEC and A level). In both cases, we will base this on information you’ve provided on your application.

Mature students (Over 21)

We welcome applications from mature candidates, including those without formal qualifications, provided you can demonstrate relevant experience and ability.

Foundation year

If you don't meet the entry requirements, why not consider our Visual Art Foundation course to help you prepare for the full degree?

Academic credit

If you have a qualification such as a foundation degree or HND, or have gained credit at another university, you may be able to enter a Middlesex University course in year two or three. Find out how you can Transfer.

If you have relevant qualifications or work experience, we may be able to count this towards your entry requirements. Find out more about Prior Learning Accreditation.

Portfolio

We will consider all applications on their individual merit. Your portfolio is your opportunity to demonstrate your dedication and suitability for this degree.

You will be asked to submit evidence of creative practice, normally presented as a portfolio.

A portfolio is a collection of your creative work that introduces you as an artist, explains your creative vision, and showcases your experience, interests, and skills.

Submit your portfolio online via our dedicated portal, preferably in one single PDF or as a web link. Your portfolio should contain between 10 and 20 good-quality images and/or short clips of time-based work, as well as samples of your research and critical writing.

A successful portfolio should:

Show range: include examples of your practice that show your ability to work with different materials, techniques and themes.
Foreground process and development: include some unfinished work to show us how you develop your ideas. We even want to see ‘creative mistakes’ and what you learned from them.
Evidence research and critical thinking: show us your knowledge of historical and contemporary art practices, and identify social and/or cultural influences in your practice. Your portfolio should contain samples of your writing in English, between 1 and 3 pages, such as excerpts from an academic essay, or a critical review of an exhibition that you have visited.
Demonstrate curiosity and self-reflexivity: include notes not only on how a work was made but also where it fits in your practice and contemporary art more broadly.
Convey your identity as an emerging artist: consider how you want to represent yourself and curate your portfolio accordingly. You must include some self-initiated work and not only responses to set project briefs.

Interview

There is no interview for this course, but you may be able to discuss it at a Meet the Tutor session.

International entry requirements
We welcome students from the UK, EU and all over the world.
Join students from over 167 countries to study at one of the top 15 international universities in the world.
There are many reasons why so many international students call our campus home:
- Quality teaching in our top facilities plus flexible online learning
- Welcoming north London campus that's only 30 minutes from central London
- Work placements and networking with top London employers
- Award-winning career support to get you where you want to go after university.
Qualifications
112-128 UCAS points
In addition to qualifications such as A level and International Baccalaureate, we accept a wide range of international qualifications.
Find out more on the relevant country support page. And if you are unsure about the suitability of your qualifications or would like help with your application, please contact your nearest regional office.
English language
You'll need good English language skills to study with us. The most common qualification we accept is the IELTS 6.0 (with minimum 5.5 in all sections). We also normally require Grade C GCSE or an equivalent qualification. For some EU countries, we may be able to accept English language competency evidenced through your high school qualification.
Find out more about our English language requirements. And, don’t worry If you don't meet our minimum English language requirements, as we offer an intensive pre-sessional English course.
Visas
To study with us in the UK, you will need a student route visa.
BA Fine Art: Portfolio Guidance
A portfolio is a collection of your creative work that introduces you as an artist, explains your creative vision, and showcases your experience, interests, and skills.
Submit your portfolio online via our dedicated portal, preferably in one single PDF or as a web link. Your portfolio should contain between 10 and 20 good-quality images and/or short clips of time-based work, as well as samples of your research and critical writing.
A successful portfolio should:
- Show range: include examples of your practice that show your ability to work with different materials, techniques and themes.
- Foreground process and development: include some unfinished work to show us how you develop your ideas. We even want to see ‘creative mistakes’ and what you learned from them.
- Evidence research and critical thinking: show us your knowledge of historical and contemporary art practices, and identify social and/or cultural influences in your practice. Your portfolio should contain samples of your writing in English, between 1 and 3 pages, such as excerpts from an academic essay, or a critical review of an exhibition that you have visited.
- Demonstrate curiosity and self-reflexivity: include notes not only on how a work was made but also where it fits in your practice and contemporary art more broadly.
- Convey your identity as an emerging artist: consider how you want to represent yourself and curate your portfolio accordingly. You must include some self-initiated work and not only responses to set project briefs.
Portfolio
We will consider all applications on their individual merit. Your portfolio is your opportunity to demonstrate your dedication and suitability for this degree.
You will be asked to submit evidence of creative practice, normally presented as a portfolio.
A portfolio is a collection of your creative work that introduces you as an artist, explains your creative vision, and showcases your experience, interests, and skills.
Submit your portfolio online via our dedicated portal, preferably in one single PDF or as a web link. Your portfolio should contain between 10 and 20 good-quality images and/or short clips of time-based work, as well as samples of your research and critical writing.
A successful portfolio should:
- Show range: include examples of your practice that show your ability to work with different materials, techniques and themes.
- Foreground process and development: include some unfinished work to show us how you develop your ideas. We even want to see ‘creative mistakes’ and what you learned from them.
- Evidence research and critical thinking: show us your knowledge of historical and contemporary art practices, and identify social and/or cultural influences in your practice. Your portfolio should contain samples of your writing in English, between 1 and 3 pages, such as excerpts from an academic essay, or a critical review of an exhibition that you have visited.
- Demonstrate curiosity and self-reflexivity: include notes not only on how a work was made but also where it fits in your practice and contemporary art more broadly.
- Convey your identity as an emerging artist: consider how you want to represent yourself and curate your portfolio accordingly. You must include some self-initiated work and not only responses to set project briefs.
Interview
There is no interview for this course, but you may be able to discuss it at a Meet the Tutor session.
Please apply via UCAS using this course’s UCAS code W101.
Need help with your application? please view our undergraduate application page.

Fees and funding

UK students*
Full-time students: £9,250
Part-time students: £77 per taught credit
EU / International students*
Full-time students: £15,100
Part-time students: £126 per taught credit
The following course-related costs are included in the fees:
- A subscription to the Adobe Cloud package
- All laser-printing and photocopying required for your study (with access to subsidised photographic and large-format printing)
  Self-service laptops available for loan
- Audio-visual equipment available for loan, including digital stills cameras, digital video recorders, digital audio recorders, through the Kit Hub.
- £50 credit per year, to spend in the MDX materials shop in the Grove.
The following course-related costs are not included in the fees, and you may be required to purchase these to complete the course. The costs are approximate and may change due to changes in pricing at the retailer:
- Art materials (e.g. paints, paper, canvas, SD cards, USB sticks, photographic film, etc.), in addition to the £50 credit that you receive to spend in the MDX materials shop in the Grove. At Level 4, basic materials to meet group assignments are provided. The cost of materials varies widely and depends wholly on your artistic choices; it is possible to spend next to nothing on the production of your work on BA Fine Art.
- Optional visits to ticketed exhibitions at museums and galleries. Please note that most compulsory visits to exhibitions are either covered by the course or subsidised, with student contributions in the region of £3.00 per exhibition.
- Optional, subsidised field trips to UK or overseas destinations.
More information?
Find answers to all your frequently asked questions including scholarships and bursaries on our undergraduate funding page.

Careers

How can the BA Fine Art support your career?

Internationally recognised and respected, Fine Art BA is a broad degree that develops your creative and critical abilities and is the best established route into a rewarding career as a professional artist. This course also aims to help you develop an extensive range of valuable transferable skills that can lead you in any number of directions after graduation.

The course supports you to develop your independent thinking and problem-solving skills, highly useful when entering the job market. Bespoke professional practice modules allow you to gain the skills you need for your chosen field and information about pathways into them.

Our Fine Art graduates are able to think strategically, work flexibly, be highly organised and use their initiative, as well as having excellent written and verbal communication skills, making them highly employable in a broad range of careers.

Past graduates have gone on to be successful in a number of fields for example working as an artist, curator, photographer, digital media professional, art therapist, teacher, lecturer, designer, researcher, writer, community art worker, performer, media professional, and entrepreneur.

Notable alumni

Kelvin Okafor

Since graduating from in 2009, Kelvin has won numerous awards for his highly detailed drawings which each take more than 100 hours to create. He took the world stage by storm in 2013 and his work has continued to enthral the public and art collectors ever since.

In 2017, he became the first black artist to be permanently exhibited in the House of Commons as part of the Parliamentary Art Collection. His stunning pencil portrait of the late Bernie Grant MP (one of the UK's first Black British MPs) hangs outside the Attlee room in Portcullis House.

More recently, he was welcomed back to Middlesex and gifted one of his famous photo-like pencil portraits, ‘Mia’s interlude’, to the University.

Other notable alumni include artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Chris Alton, Benedict Drew, Hayley Newman, Serena Korda, Heather Phillipson, and Michelle Williams Gamaker. Alumni in art management or curatorial roles include Director of Towner Art Gallery Joe Hill, Observer art critic Laura Cumming, and Hayley Dixon, head of finance and operations at Studio Voltaire. Further distinguished alumni include Goldfrapp singer Alison Goldfrapp, Olympic boxing champion and painter Joe Joyce, and artist Anish Kapoor.

Facilities

The facilities, studios and workshops at our purpose-built Grove building on campus in North London are recognised as among the best in country. With a wide range of specialist workshops, digital media, equipment, software and library facilities on-site you'll benefit from unique levels of access to both the latest forms of technology and traditional tools with expert support to help you develop your work.

The Special Collections are held in the Materials Room in the Sheppard Library and is a supervised room for research and inspiration.
Housed in our Grove building, you will have dedicated space within the fine art studios, allowing you to fully immerse yourselves in your work.
Printing at Middlesex: Screenprinting
Printmaking at Middlesex: Relief
Printmaking at Middlesex: Lithography
Printmaking at Middlesex: Etching
State of the art printing equipment
Art studio
Life drawing workshop

Campus life

International students

Study abroad

Work and career

Support services

Staff profiles

Alice Maude-Roxby
Programme Leader BA Fine Art

Alice Maude-Roxby studied Fine Art at Newcastle, and Photography in the class of Dieter Appelt at the Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin. National and international grants and fellowships enabled her to research and make work abroad, including Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Berlin, Leverhulme Trust, Norway, Japan Foundation, Tokyo, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England in the UK. Initially working within a fine art context, her work was included in exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and England & Co in the UK, and various galleries in Germany and Scandinavia. More recently she has focused on curating, photography and writing. She has been involved in an extensive body of work looking at the collaborative processes involved in the recording of performance.

Dr John Timberlake
Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

Dr Timberlake joined Middlesex University in 2007. A practising artist, he has exhibited widely and his work is held in a number of collections in Europe and the US. He gained his Ph.D. in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Dr Loraine Leeson
Senior Lecturer, Art Practice and the Community

Dr Leeson is known for her collaborative and participatory work in East London, including the Docklands Community Poster Project in the 1980's. Her work with young people has been recognised by a Media Trust Inspiring Voices award and Olympic Inspire Mark, while her public artwork The Catch was voted a London 2012 Landmark. Her project Active Energy has received the Best Arts and Green Energy award from Regen SW.

Alberto Duman
Lecturer in Art Practice and the Community

Alberto Duman’s interdisciplinary work is located at the intersection between art and urban spatial practice across diverse media and collaborative partnerships, with particular concerns to social context and the role of art in the cultural production of urban space. He is Artist in Residence at UEL with Music for Masterplanning.

Simon Read
Associate Professor, Fine Art

Simon Read is concerned with environmental change and works with coastal communities to help foster understanding of coastal and estuarine issues. He is also engaged in the management of the liminal intertidal zone. He has built experimental structures to manage tidal flow through saltmarsh, including A Tidal Protection Barrier for Sutton Saltmarsh on the River Deben in Suffolk and Falkenham Saltmarsh Tidal Management Scheme.

Dr Alexandra Kokoli
Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture-Fine Art

Dr Kokoli's interests are situated within feminist art history, theory and practice, particularly the relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis, gender politics of popular visual culture and contemporary feminist movements. She is author of The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (Bloomsbury, 2016) and editor of Feminism Reframed (Cambridge Scholars, 2008) and The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller (1977-2007) (JRP Ringier, 2008).

Keith Piper
Associate Professor in Fine Art

Keith Piper is a member of the Diasporas Research Cluster and the Science Fiction Research Cluster.

Keith Piper’s creative practice exists in response to specific issues, historical relationships and geographical sites. His research driven approach prioritises thematic exploration over an attachment to any particular media. Therefore, his work over the past 25 years has ranged from painting, through photography and installation to a use of digital media, video and computer based interactivity.

As a student at Trent Polytechnic in the early 1980s, Piper was a founder member of the Blk Art Group. Since then he has exhibited work internationally, published writings and taught in institutions in the UK and North America. His recent work has included The Perfect City, a multiscreen video project commissioned by Film London (2007), solo exhibitions in the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2004) and the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (2007). He was also commissioned to produce site specific works for the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of Uncomfortable Truths (2007) and The Black Atlantic for the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2004).

Student profiles

Kelvin Okafor

Fine Art BA graduate

Kelvin's pencil and charcoal drawings became a huge internet hit after his work was featured on the BBC London news, leading to further coverage across the globe and media appearances in countries including Nigeria, Italy, France and Denmark and most of the UK's national newspapers.
It was unbelievable. The week before it all happened I was in my studio having an average week, and the next I was on TV and being tweeted about by Tinie Tempah. Before I would hope to sell one piece a month, but since I've sold five. It was an unexpected but amazing boost for my career.
I've even had feedback from Corinne Bailey Rae to say she likes my portrait of her, and sent Queen Noor of Jordan my drawing of the late King Hussein as a gift, and she responded to say she was delighted. I owe a great deal to the University because all of this stemmed from there.
Amy Honour

Fine Art BA graduate

The University has everything you need to be successful, some of the best resources and facilities. It sounds obvious but everything is set up to help you do well and to prepare you as an artist for the 'outside world', you just have to take it on and do it. So go to lectures, make tutorials, and push yourself and your peers.
Natasha Kiddle

Fine Art BA graduate

Natasha works for luxury brand LK Bennett
Alongside technical teaching and guidance for my craft, the Fine Art degree at Middlesex University taught me a valuable lesson in understanding how to market myself (as an artist, entrepreneur or brand) and products (Art or any other consumable) and drive them towards success. I have used these skills to build a successful career in Luxury Management where my main objective is to drive the business towards financial success. The course has put me in good stead for reaching goals in my business ahead of other managers as I was shown how to devise 'creative' solutions to complex problems.

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