Composer's Workshop: CSVPA

Edward Dimsdale / Professor of Art & Contemporary Visual Culture / Head of the Graduate School, Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts (CSVPA)

After studying Social Sciences at the University of Bristol, Ed assisted photographers and worked in darkrooms as a photographic printer. As a freelance photographer in the early 1990s, he worked in London and Paris. While studying for an MA Printmaking at the Cambridge School of Art, he explored contemporary applications for the historical method of photogravure.

Ed has exhibited his photography widely, and his work is held in public and private collections. Exhibitions include Agulhas at HackelBury Fine Art (London); Picturing Eden, a five-year touring museum show curated by Deborah Klochko for the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; and Model Love (Arnolfini, Bristol; BAC, London), an intermedial collaboration with experimental theatre company, Bodies in Flight. A photographic publication, Stilled, was published by Stanley Barker in 2017.

As a writer on photography and culture, Ed has contributed to numerous publications, including Hotshoe magazine. He has also written introductory essays for a number of photographic monographs, including Ian Macdonald’s Eton (IM Press, 2007), Lam Pok Yin and Chong Ng’s The Untimely Apparatus of Two Amateur Photographers (Jiazazhi Press, 2019) and Kim Thue’s Lode (Serpent’s Tail, 2022). His academic writing includes the joint paper Unsettling Materialities: The Indexical Relationship of Photography and Theatre in Bodies in Flight’s Model Love (2017), for the Journal of Photography and Culture, a collaboration with Professor Simon Jones of Bristol University.

Ed has taught at the Cambridge School of Art (Anglia Ruskin University), where he was co-ordinator of Critical and Contextual Studies. Previously, he spent ten years the London College of Communication (UAL), where he was a Senior Lecturer in Photography Theory. He has also lectured at the University of Coventry, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Slade School of Art. He is a current member of the CHEAD (Council for Higher Education in Art & Design) Research Strategy Alliance Group.

At CSVPA, where he is a Professor of Art & Contemporary Visual Culture, Ed oversees the Graduate School courses, bringing interdisciplinary perspectives to bear across the programmes, seeking to implement innovative pedagogic approaches for art & design education, and contributing to the fostering of a distinctive research culture at CSVPA. He also contributes to the development of inter-institutional relationships through the CSVPA Arts Lab initiative.

www.instagram.com/edward_dimsdale