About the speakers
Dr Melanie Doderer-Winkler, co-curator of Georgian Illuminations, is an art historian and furniture specialist formerly at Christie’s, King's Street, London. She is the author of Magnificent Entertainments: Temporary Architecture for Georgian Festivals (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2013) and writes and lectures about the splendour and pageantry of eighteenth-century entertaining. As a longstanding member of the Furniture History Society, she has organised numerous study tours within Europe and Overseas. For nearly a decade, until earlier this year, she served as a trustee of The Georgian Group, Britain's premier architectural preservation charity.
Nayan Kulkarni is a multimedia artist whose work engages with ideas of site specificity, time, technology and perception. These themes are manifested in work that is generated from specific concepts, processes or places through diverse media such as light, video, installation, sculpture and photography. Underpinning his practice is an ongoing theoretical and technological research base in digital media and computer controlled artificial light. Supporting this research is his interest in contemporary and historical science fiction, photographic theory and architectural theory.
Geoffrey Major is a fine art conservator with Zenzie Tinker Conservation who prepared the never previously exhibited linen transparencies for display in Georgian Illuminations. He trained as a paper conservator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia and both the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Geoffrey was Senior Paper Conservator and Head of Conservation at the National Gallery of Australis, Canberra, where he worked for more than 15 years. In 2000 he established a private conservation practice in Sydney specialising in modern and contemporary art. Geoffrey joined Zenzie Tinker Conservation in 2009, bringing a broad range of find and decorative arts conservation knowledge. Geoffrey specialises in mixed media objects, modern paintings and works of art on paper. He also designs and builds bespoke museum cabinets and exhibition display mounts.
Dr Louise Stewart is Head of Exhibitions at Sir John Soane’s Museum. A curator and art historian with broad research interests in social history and visual culture, she has previously worked for various museums, galleries and arts organisations including the National Portrait Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary, The National Centre for Craft and Design and Ordinary Culture. She completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham in 2015 and her doctoral research focused on court and country house entertainments in early modern England.Stewart has published widely on topics including popular portraiture, royal iconography, Tudor banqueting and contemporary art.
