About Me

Dr Rebecca Bell is a writer, researcher, educator and painter based in Bristol. She lectures in Visual Culture across the school of Art & Design at UWE Bristol. Rebecca holds a PhD in Czech craft under Socialism from the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art (RCA), which looked at methods of making for the state under restrictive political circumstances, in textiles, glass, ceramics and fashion.

Rebecca obtained an MA (Hons) and MPhil in History of Art at the University of Glasgow. She worked for over a decade in contemporary art commissioning in the public realm, with artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and organisations including DACS and Art on the Underground. She has taught contextual studies and visual culture at a range of institutions, including Middlesex University, UMPRUM Prague, NYU, the London College of Fashion, University of Hertfordshire, The School of Life, and the Royal College of Art. She ran the Curating in Contemporary Art and Design Summer School at the Royal College of Art from 2015-2019.

Rebecca is a painter, using drawing and painting as a method of research, exploring relationships to text and landscape, with a particular interest in the context of the Anthropocene and ideas of making in times of unmaking. She is currently curating a collaborative project with 19 makers across disciplines and locations, focusing on ideas of embodied daily practice (see more here), which will result in a zine and symposium in 2023-24.

Rebecca is a member of the UWE Visual Culture Research Group, which is a group of cross-disciplinary art and design practitioners, historians and theorists interested in visuality and visual culture. She is currently working on collaborative research projects with cultural institutions in the Czech Republic and Hungary, and in 2020 co-founded a Pedagogies of Hope research working group, which focuses on locating notions of care, nourishment and hope in structures of higher education, working with researchers and educators across the UK.

Rebecca’s research focuses on making practices under politically controlled conditions, craft methodologies, pastoral materialities and pedagogies of hope. She has published on art, craft and design for a variety of publications including The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, West 86th Journal, The Journal of Modern Craft, Artforum Magazine, Home Cultures Journal, the Central and Eastern European London Review, and co-edited publications such as The Roundel: 100 Artists Remake a London Icon (2013). She also co-translated the first Czech edition of Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea.