DIANA ALI

Born in Rusholme, Manchester to Bangladeshi parents, Diana has a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University and a Masters in Contemporary Fine Art Curating/ Practice from Sheffield Hallam University. As a Visual Artist, she has exhibited regionally, nationally at the TINAG festival, London and Site Gallery, Sheffield and solo at the Airspace Gallery, Hanley. Her international exhibitions include The Library Artspace, Victoria, Australia, The Crafts Fair in San Franciso, The Roaming Biennial in Tehran and the Other Asia’s exhibition ‘ReDo Pakistan’ in Karachi, Pakistan and has had her text based work featured in The Disarmory Newspaper in New York. Her medium involves fictional writing, drawing, installation and a play on text. She is interested in correspondence, networking, collaboration and connectivity in her practice and her research explores the use of correspondence for our fictitious characters to exist. Her curatorial projects include directing ‘Up & Coming’ at the CUC in Liverpool, an event showcasing 60 emerging national and international artists, ‘Subversive Correspondence’ featuring fifty artists in London and Bristol and ‘Dialogues: A Fake Romance?’ in Swansea with thirty artists. She has also curated the ‘Defamiliarization’ touring exhibition in London and Sheffield where her work explored artists’ responses from the local to the global. Her current work is an extension of this where she experiments with instructional methods and exchanges. To date she has independently curated eight shows. She is also the assistant curator for Pop Samiti, an arts magazine based in London. In addition to being a visual artist and curator, she is also a lecturer, freelance workshop leader, an arts educator and creative mentor. She has been recently lecturing at Huanghui University in China. She is currently lecturing at Derby College.