Dr Isabella Streffen

Isabella Streffen is an award-winning artist who currently leads the MA Contemporary Art Practice. She is best known for her work on the cultural history, politics and poetics of perception, experimental art criticism and the viewing position. Her multi-modal, site-specific works and texts have been exhibited and circulated internationally. She studied at Sheffield Hallam University and the Courtauld Institute of Art before being awarded her doctorate by Newcastle University in 2012. 

Since 2013 she has held research fellowships and teaching posts at a range of institutions, and joined De Montfort as VC2020 Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in 2019. She is a specialist in practice research and writing for practice. She is currently Internal Verifier for the Foundation Art & Design, as well as being External Examiner on the MA Fine Art at Winchester School of Art.

Isabella's work has been collected by The Terra Foundation, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Library of Congress, Northumberland County Council, Leeds College of Art Library and private collections. She is published by Ma Bibliothèque, Sublunary Editions, MAP, Minor Lits, Dunlin Press and others, and her lyric work on close reading Fabulae: How It Begins was one of GRANTA’s books of 2023.

Institute of Art and Design

Selected exhibitions

Solo shows:

2012 Requisite, Alderman Fenwick’s House, Newcastle upon Tyne 

2011 An Exquisite Golden Instrument, Maison Perry, Giverny, France

Group exhibitions:

2023    Dreams of Exiled Souls, Cross Lane Projects, Kendal                Petrologic, The Leicester Gallery, Leicester

2022    Everything is Made of Light, Bermondsey Project Space, London

Exploded Lunch Report: Protocol, Radio On Berlin (produced by Dominic Smith)

Exploded Lunch Report: Dreams, Radio On Berlin (produced by Dominic Smith)

2021      screening: Carthorse Orchestra online salon (curated Susannah Crossman)

screening: you never see me online salon (curated by Alison J Carr)

2019-20   Camouflage: Art Nature War, FeliXart Museum, Brussels (curated Céline de Potter)

2019        Radiophrenia 2019, CCA, Glasgow

Goes To Print, Leicester Print Workshop, Leicester

Writing Skyscapes, Backlit, Nottingham

Writing Skyscapes 2, Cresswell Crags Visitor and Heritage Centre, Worksop

 2018      Viewing Pleasure, Temporary Contemporary, Huddersfield

screening ­– Museum of the Moving Image, New York

screening – Hanover Film Festival, Hanover

2017        #exstrange, hosted by Project Anywhere (curated by Rebekah Modrak and Maria-Laure Ghidini) 

screening – Flatpack Festival

 2016-17    Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1905-2016, The Whitney Museum of American Art (curated by Chrissie Iles) 

2016          Art Athina

Library Interventions, Chelsea College of Arts Library (curated by Sharon Kivland)

screening: Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh

screening: HeK, Basle

2015         The New Black, Resonate 15, Belgrade (curated by Nora O Murchú)

screening: Moving Image Istanbul

screening: Photographer’s Gallery, London

screening: Transmediale, Berlin

screening: Gray Area, San Francisco

screening: Vivid Projects, Birmingham

The Wrong Digital Art Biennial

Finishing School, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London

Library Interventions, Leeds Library (curated by Sharon Kivland)

What’s To Hand, SIA, Sheffield (curated by Jo Ray)

2014    Library Interventions, Leeds College of Art Library (curated by Sharon Kivland)

screening: Western Front, Vancouver

screening: Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam

screening: Transfer Gallery, New York

screening: The John F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin

Festival of Film Animation, Olomouc, Czech Republic

You Me You Me You Me, S1, Sheffield

2012      5x5, The Cherry Blossom Festival, Washington DC (curated by Richard Hollinshead)

Magnificent Distance, Globe Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

2011    Aeronaut, 25SG, Newcastle upon Tyne

2010    Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall, commissioned by Hadrian’s Wall Heritage/Inspire Northumberland

Single-authored books

2022     Fabulae: How It Begins (London: Ma Bibliothèque)

Anthologies (digital and print)

2025 On A Tenderness For Category Errors, Hymn To The Living Poet, vol 5, Verse of April 

2024    Indice, OBJECT: Contemporary Poetry and Experimental Text (Wivenhoe: Dunlin Press)

2024     Cyanometer for my Heart, Atmospheric Quarterly 1.1

2024     Taxonomies of Reading, Firmament, ed Jessica Sequiera (Seattle: Sublunary Editions)

2024     An Introduction to what will never be written, Minor Lit[s]

2023     yes…is the answer, Vigilantia (Kendal: Chrome Editions)

2023     Taxonomies of Critique, Firmament, ed Jessica Sequiera (Seattle: Sublunary Editions)

2021     Proposals on Enchantment, The Yellow Paper no 2, ed. Laura Haynes (Glasgow: GSA)

2021     Romantic Geologies, Babel Tower Notice Board, ed Richard Capener (2021) (also published in What We Did In The Apocalypse, Hem Press, 2024)

2020     A cosmic or elemental force enters the text as the flower blooms…Let it, On Care, eds Sharon Kivland & Rebecca Jagoe (London: Ma Bibliothèque)

2018      The Catalogue of Unsatisfied Desires, Do Not Make The, ed. Alice Bain & Elizabeth Reeder (Glasgow: MAP)

2017-18 GardenLust monthly column commissioned by MAP Magazine, Glasgow

Book chapters/journal articles 

2025   The Erotic Hauntology of Autocorrect in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities special edition on ‘Creepiness as Queer Ecology’ (forthcoming, accepted)

2019   Beyond The Ivory Tower: Impact and the Arts Practitioner in Research Impact and The Early Career Researcher ed. Bayley, Fenby-Hulse, Heywood & Walker (London: Routledge, 2019)

2018    The And Or Project: The Third Way in Artists, Academics, Museums, 21st Century Perspectives ed Kunny and Costache (New York: Routledge, 2018) pp176-190

2014    The money shot: burning, falling, vanishing in Show Me The Money: the image of finance 1700 to the present ed. Crossthwaite, Knight and Marsh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 104-125

2013    The Underlying Horror of the English Countryside in Dandelion vol 4 number 2 (London, 2013)

Isabella's key research interests are the cultural history, politics and poetics of vision; desire, intimacy and technology; site-specific practice; art and heritage sites: writing for practice.

She is particularly interested in receiving enquiries from potential practice research doctoral candidates in the broad areas of sensory poetics, site-based practices, artwriting, and love.

Fine art practice, history and theory; curatorial studies; textual practice

PhD Fine Art, Newcastle University, 2012
MFA, Newcastle University, 2008 (Distinction)
BA (Hons) Fine Art: Combined and Media, Sheffield Hallam University, 2001 (1st)

Postgraduate: Research Lab 1 (research methods); Experimental and Curatorial Practice; Research Lab 2 (The Writing Lab); Research Residency; Exhibitionary Practice

Undergraduate: studio practice

2020 Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award
2014 Newcastle Journal Award, best regional exhibition, Show Me The Money
2010 British Tourism Award, gold, Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall
2010 Newcastle Journal Award, best regional cultural event, Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall
2008 Axis MA Art Star

Being With: the poetics and proxy-erotics of 21st Century Intimacy (2024-)

Isabella is currently working on a series of texts, exhibitions, events and artworks which explore intimacy and loneliness in the context of contemporary technologies.

Full Spectrum Metaphysics (2020-)

Isabella is currently working on a series of texts, exhibitions, events and artworks which explore our understanding of the full sensorium in art. This includes projects such as to talk about touch is a touch (drawings and text); A Theory of Kissing (book); and A Speech Radical and Two Fires (seven films).

Previous projects:

Experimental, Hybrid and Art Writing (2018-25): challenged the relationship between art object and art criticism, to explore methods of coming to knowledge about new forms of art, complicating the relationships between the visual/textual and the object/interpretation

Reading and Writing Art After The Internet (2015-20): researched models of digital collaboration and the concept of the feedback loop through co-production, orchestration, and group consultation, testing how the method of collaboration influences the outcome, and exploring architectures of power in exhibition and the internet.

On Camouflage (2014-19): expanded Shell’s work on chameleonic camouflage (2012) to bring ideas of resubjectification through tourism and heritage into dialogue with contemporary theories of surveillance and military practice. 

Show Me The Money, the image of finance 1700-present (2014-16): 
investigated the role of artists’ work in curatorial practice through the creation of a collective 300 year image of finance, in four exhibitions and a book chapter. It fo. rmed part of an AHRC/Arts Council England funded project by the same name, led by PI Dr Peter Knight (University of Manchester). 

2020 ‘Proposals for Enchantment’, Writing/Performance, Royal College of Art, London
2019 ‘Razzle Dazzle ‘Em’, Contemporary Artists and Camouflage, New Perspectives on Camouflage, FeliXart Museum, Drogenbros-Brussels
2017 ‘Dronology: a taxonomy of drones’, Aerial Art Vehicles, College Art Association Annual Conference (CAA), New York
2015 ‘Britain from Above: Camoufleurs and Contemporary Art’, Modern Wars, Revolutionary Cartographies, MSA 17, Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Boston
2014 ‘The Third Way: the And Or Project’, Finding Common Ground: Academics, Artists and Museums, College Art Association Conference (CAA), Chicago, with Siofra McSherry
2014 ‘Drones baby Drones’, Trust Issues: Community, Contingency and Security in North America, John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität, Berlin (keynote)
2014 ‘Surreptitious Networks: the human residue of networked practices’, AHRC Cultural Engagement showcase, University of Liverpool
2013 ‘The Underlying Horror of the English Countryside’, Silent Spring: Chemical, Biological and Technological Visions of the Post-1945 Environment, Centre for Modern Studies, University of York
2013 ‘Field craft: the intersection of tools, theories and tactics in pursuit of an artistic objective’, Practice-led Research, Baltic 39
2013 ‘Dark on the Rock: fictions of the Cold War’, Cold War Unlimited, University of Sheffield
2010 ‘Dead Reckoning: snipers, artists and the myth of scopic control’, Thinking, Doing & Publishing Visual Research: The State of The Field, International Visual Sociology Association, University of Bologna
2007 ‘Chora: reclaiming visible light in 4800 parts’, Power and Space: Transforming The Contemporary City, CRASSH, University of Cambridge

Ottis Sturmey, ft, 1st supervisor

Harriet Walker, ft, 1st supervisor