Fiona Dean
Fiona joins GWL as Co-ordinator/Adviser to the Making Space project with specific focus on working with the artists to develop the public art brief and identify opportunities for learning in relation to the artists’ processes of investigation.
Work by 3rd Year students from Maxwellton High School in the Cultural Transitions exhibition
Fiona studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art. She completed her PhD at Stirling University’s Institute of Education, where she looked at issues of social class and inclusion to visual arts practice. Before crossing into research and development, Fiona worked for a number of years as an artist exhibiting widely in the UK and internationally, as well as undertaking national and international residencies and public art commissions.
She has received a number of awards to support research into public art and learning, including a Churchill Fellowship to allow travel to the USA, visiting a range of programmes that use the city or specific locality as a learning context for art and education development. Fiona led on the initial development of the Scottish Arts Council’s Public Art Resource+Research Scotland (PAR+RS), and was involved with the associated Working in Public seminars with Grays school of art and artist/educator Suzanne Lacy.
She has participated in conferences on art and education and widening participation, including the International Society for Education through Art (INSEA) World Congress in New York and the European Access Network (EAN) annual conference in Vienna, and has published a number of research reports and articles on the learning potential of artists’ strategies of interaction. Most recently these include Cultural Transitions, which tracked the experiences of a group of 16-18 year olds as they developed self-directed learning through visual arts as a means of investigating their ideas of culture in relation to self and their communities.
Fiona has worked in a range of community and higher education contexts, and currently works freelance as fugitivespaces, from where she has developed a range of artist-led research and development projects.
