Fusco, Maria

Dr Maria Fusco is Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. She is a Belfast born interdisciplinary writer working across art writing, fiction, performance and theory. Previously she was Professor at Northumbria University, Reader at University of Edinburgh and Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London: currently a visiting Professor at Hochschule fur Gestaltung (Frankfurt) and Senior Research Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam through 2018. 

Her practice-led research is award winning, has been translated into twelve languages and is commissioned by leading international bodies and publishers including: Artangel, Art Metropole (Toronto), BBC Radio 4, Book Works, Creative Time (NY), National Theatre Wales, Routledge and funded by bodies such as the AHRC, Arts Council England, Art Fund, The Carnegie Trust, Creative Scotland and The Wellcome Trust. 

Her most recent work is Mollspeak (2021), an eleven-channel permanent sound installation commissioned by Museum of the Home, London. The work is a collaboration with French composer, Olivier Pasquet and is voiced by renowned actor, Maxine Peake.

Her latest books are Legend of the Necessary Dreamer (2017) described by Chris Kraus as “a new classic of female philosophical fiction”, Give Up Art: Collected Critical Writings (2018) of which James Elkins had written "after a book like this, most nonfiction seemscuriously unaware of what writing can be.” 

She is Editorial Director of The Happy Hypocrite, an annual journal for experimental writing, has been invited Writer-in-Residence at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Lisbon Architecture Trienale and Whitechapel Gallery (London) and is an Hawthornden Fellow and a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.

She is currently working on new opera about the Belfast peacelines with the Royal Opera House, London.

Current research is in three interrelated strands: dialect and ‘non-standard English’ in international critical art writing; fiction as a critical tool in contemporary art, performative writing methodologies. 

Maria is interested in hearing from potential PhD candidates working in related research areas, such as: art writing; artists' novels; creative & critical hybrids; experimental & interdisciplinary writing; publishing as practice; writing for performance.