Sarah Perks

Biography

Sarah Perks is a curator, writer, producer and broadcaster who works across contemporary visual art, film and literature to create major exhibitions, books and films that challenge the dominant narratives of our time.

She has curated over 50 major exhibitions and new commissions, working with artists Rosa Barba, Judith Barry, Phil Collins, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Louis Henderson, Rachel Maclean and Qasim Riza Shaheen, among others. Recent group exhibitions include The Return of Memory (2017), which explored the post-Soviet ‘New East’; La Movida (2017), which responded to 40 years since the first elections in Spain; and Imitation of Life: Race and Melodrama in the 21st Century (2016), co-curated with Omar Kholeif.

Perks set up HOME Artist Film (previously Cornerhouse Artist Film), a project committed to the theatrical distribution of new artist features, and co-created Feature Expanded in 2014, an innovative Creative Europe-funded training programme for visual artists making their first feature film. Her latest feature film projects include Phil Collins’ Ceremony (2018), for which she was executive producer, and Island of the Hungry Ghosts (Gabrielle Brady, 2018), which was the Tribeca Film Festival Best Documentary winner.

Professor at Manchester School of Art and an Artistic Associate at HOME, Perks has edited and contributed to over 15 publications in the last three years. Forthcoming is a major publication with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University Press), co-edited with Erika Balsom and Lucy Reynolds, about artist moving image in Britain. She was named one of Creative Review’s Creative Leaders 50 (2017), and she has served on the jury of the Margaret Tait Award (2018) and as a nominator for the EYE Art & Film Prize.

Born in 1977 in Oldham, UK, Perks currently lives and works in Manchester.

SAF participation:
Sharjah Film Platform (December 2019)
March Meeting 2019