This months Guest Speaker:
Katherine Wood has been Director of firstsite since its inception in 1994. Since this time firstsite has pioneered an integrated way of working through its gallery without walls philosophy and high profile education and publications programmes. Katherine has developed the organisation to attract international artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Yoko Ono to Colchester; expand opportunities and raise the profile of local and regionally based artists; celebrate the visual arts history of Colchester and put firstsite on the national visual arts map. Its capital project, firstsite:newsite, a new 3000m² building designed by Rafael Viñoly, has been in development since 1999 and will be successfully complete by 2009.
Katherine came to Colchester from Bristol where she was the Exhibitions Officer at Arnolfini. She was previously selected to train as exhibitions organiser at Third Eye Centre, Glasgow in 1989 (Scottish Arts Council bursary funded) where she curated the Canadian exhibition ‘Other Frontiers’. She has a BA (Hons) degree in Film & Media Studies with Fine Art from the University of Stirling, which included a Museum Studies Graduate course from the University of Kansas, USA. In 1999 she won acclaim in Cosmopolitan’s Women of Achievement awards.
