2021 Book Awards

Erika Balsom is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of, most recently, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017) and An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (2018), and the co-editor of Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 (2019). Alongside her academic work, she regularly writes criticism for publications including Artforum, 4Columns, and Cinema Scope, and co-curated the film programme “Shoreline Movements” for the 2020 Taipei Biennial. In 2017, she was awarded a Leverhulme Prize.

Steven Bode is Director of Film and Video Umbrella, the UK’s leading makers of artists’ moving image. During his time in that role, he has initiated and overseen almost two hundred different projects, including major new works from internationally-acclaimed artists such as Ed Atkins, Duncan Campbell, Tacita Dean, Johan Grimonprez, Isaac Julien, Mark Leckey, Melanie Manchot, Elizabeth Price, Gillian Wearing, and Jane & Louise Wilson.  Alongside this commissioning activity, he has also curated a number of other large-scale group exhibitions such as ‘Somewhere Becoming Sea’ (2017, for Hull UK City of Culture); ‘There is No Road’ (2008, for LABoral, Gijón, Spain); ‘The Other Side of Zero’ (2000, for Video Positive, Liverpool), ‘Airport’ (1997, for Photographers’ Gallery, London, with Jeremy Millar), several editions of the Jerwood/FVU Awards, and film and video programmes such as ‘New Video from Great Britain’ (1997, for MoMA, New York). He has written extensively about video, film and contemporary art for several publications, and has contributed essays to many artists’ monographs, including substantial texts on Dryden Goodwin (for the book, ‘Cast’, 2009) and Zineb Sedira (for ‘Beneath the Surface’, 2011) as well as catalogue essays for numerous Film and Video Umbrella publications.

Gideon Koppel is an artist and filmmaker, perhaps best known for the feature-length film ‘sleep furiously’ which has a soundtrack by Aphex Twin. He is Professor of Film at Manchester School of Art and an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.

Patrizia Di Bello is Professor of History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London where she co-directs the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre and, with students and colleagues inside and out of the University, looks after the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal History of Photography. Her most recent publication is ‘Carlyle like a rough block of Michael Angelo’s’: Thinking Photography through Sculpture in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Portraits’ in Photography and the Art: Essays on Nineteenth-century Practices and Debates, edited by Juliet Hacking and Joanne Lukitsh (Bloomsbury 2020), pp.115-127. Books include Sculptural Photographs from The Calotype to Digital Technologies (Bloomsbury 2017), The Photobook from Talbot to Ruscha (IB Tauris, 2012), edited with Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir, and Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian Britain: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Ashgate 2007).

Anna Fox (b.1961) is one of the most acclaimed British photographers of the last thirty years and is Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts. Working in colour, Fox first gained attention for Work Stations: Office Life in London (1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher’s Britain. She is best known for Zwarte Piet (1993-8), a series of twenty portraits taken over a five-year period that explore Dutch black-face’ folk traditions associated with Christmas. Her collaborative projects Country Girls and Pictures of Linda challenge our views about rural life in England. Anna Fox Photographs 1983 – 2007, was published by Photoworks in 2007. Fox’s solo shows have been seen at Photographer’s Gallery, London, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago amongst others and her work has been included in international group shows including Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant Garde at Tate Liverpool and How We Are: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain. She was shortlisted for the 2010 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize and her joint exhibition with Karen Knorr, Another Way of Telling curated by Shanghai Center of Photography toured China in 2018-19. Fox is currently working on the research project Fast Forward; women in photography for which she was awarded a Leverhulme nternational Networks Award. www.fastforward.photography.com also see annafox.co.uk

With over 30 years experience Jennie Ricketts is an independent photography editor, curator, consultant and mentor. For 17 of those years she was a picture researcher and then picture editor at The Observer Magazine, commissioning and editing photography which attracted international recognition and widespread publication. She launched the Jennie Ricketts Gallery in Brighton in 2006 while writing and lecturing and now operates from County Wicklow, Ireland as an online space representing international photographers. She is currently a Trustee for Autograph ABP, The Martin Parr Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board for PhotoIreland, Dublin.