Isobel Whitelegg is Director of the MA in Curating at Chelsea College of Art and Design Research Officer and AHRC Fellow with the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), Camberwell College of Arts, UK
Isobel Whitelegg completed her BA at Winchester School of Art before specialising in modern and contemporary Latin American Art at the Department of Art History & Theory, University of Essex. While completing her PhD there (2001-2005), she was a curatorial advisor to the University’s collection of Latin American art. As a post-doctoral Research Fellow at Essex, she focused on the presence and critical reception of artists from Latin America in the sixties and seventies Britain.
Her published writing has focused on the retrieval of exhibition histories, including research on the gallery Signals London (Signals Echoes Traces in Guy Brett & Luciano Figueiredo, Oiticica in London; London: Tate Publishers, 2007) and the Bienal de São Paulo (The Bienal de São Paulo Unseen/Undone, 1969/81 in Afterall #22; Antwerp-London-Los Angeles: Autumn 2009).
She has curated exhibitions in collaboration with artists from Brazil; she is currently co-convening a new international research forum on Transnational Latin American Art for the University of Texas at Austin, and is a member of the international research network Conceptualismos del Sur.
Her research and writing addresses Latin American art as a field constructed by sites of external reception and paradoxically dominated by English-language knowledge, attempting to negotiate the difference and distance between localised sites of action and dominant sites of reception.