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Dr Kate Liston

Assistant Professor

Department: Northumbria School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries

I am an Assistant Professor at Northumbria University. I currently lead on two Fine Art Foundation Year and two Year 1 BA Fine Art modules, and I supervise practice-led or interdisciplinary PhDs. Previous to my position here I was an Associate Lecturer at Sunderland University. 

I have produced site-responsive artist commissions since 2010, spanning installation, writing and moving-image. I am interested in the ways humans relate to and understand their environments. In research terms this means I engage with cognitive processing, tacit knowledge production and sensory learning within the more-than-human world. In practical terms, it means I respond to ideas and materials which are to hand and work site-responsively. In addition to my solo practice, I collaborate with artist Tess Denman-Cleaver and separately, with an evolving group of staff and students at Northumbria as NEUSCHLOSS. 

My own PhD Link Zone: an exploration of the sensation of knowledge through a practice of art and writing (2017) used storytelling and autotheory to challenge presuppositions about the immateriality of knowledge within the academy. I am interested in supervising practice-led PhDs engaging in a broad range of subjects, particularly those seeking to explore embodied knowledge, human / non-human relations, and especially those using writing as practice. 

Kate Liston

  • Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
  • Sinkhole, Liston, K. 12 May 2025
  • Art writing as absorption into the world, Liston, K. 17 Apr 2024, In: Journal of Writing in Creative Practice
  • Cleaved Into, Jackson, M., Hughes, A., O'Sullivan, T., Guy, L., Liston, K., Danby, C. 8 Mar 2023
  • LOOP, Liston, K., O'Sullivan, T., Qureshi, A., Reed, G., Sworn, C., Danby, C., Culver, M., Morris, R., Tatham, J. 30 Nov 2023
  • The Island, the Bench and the Sofa at Home: The archipelago-like network of artists and audiences involved in the exhibition Town Hall Meeting of the Air,2021, and its 2022 tour., Liston, K. 25 Jun 2022, Island Studies International Conference
  • The Island, the Bench, and the Sofa at Home: Sensations of Communion in the Exhibition Town Hall Meeting of the Air, Liston, K. 3 Jul 2022, 13th SAR Conference 2022
  • ENTWINED: Rural, Land, Lives, Art, Liston, K., Douglas, S., Fintan, S., Ketteringham, E., Gallagher, C., Coleman, R., Hodges, J., Kennedy, B., O'Sullivan, T. 4 Sep 2021
  • ENTWINED Associate Artist Kate Liston in conversation with Roy Claire Potter, Liston, K. 29 Nov 2021, ENTWINED Online Assemblage
  • Openings, Liston, K. 20 Aug 2021
  • Spiralling, Liston, K. 1 Dec 2021, ENTWINED, Sunderland, Art Editions North

  • Kathryn Elkin Full Bodied - New Insights into Voice as Resistance Within the Broadcasting Ban Archive Start Date: 01/10/2025
  • Rebecca Mather Singing Stories of Creative Sanctuary: A practice ethnography of singing-youth theatre with communities with migration experience Start Date: 17/09/2024

  • Fine Art PhD June 30 2016
  • Fine Art PhD June 30 2016


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