I am a curator, sound archivist, and AHRC-funded PhD researcher based in London. For 20 years I’ve worked with sound; preserving and interpreting historical recordings and curating spaces for archives to be experienced in connection with their political, social, and cultural contexts. 

For the last 10 years, I have worked as a curator at the British Library, caring for collections of ethnographic sound recordings, in the World and Traditional Music department in the sound archive. As part of my work, I have led artist residencies for international, multidisciplinary artists to engage with the collections and spend time listening, without a demand to produce new work. I’ve combined my curatorial work at the British Library with an independent practice that engages historical sound recordings through exhibitions, text and audio publications, listening sessions, and radio

This experience and knowledge informs my current practice-based PhD in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies which is a Collaborative Doctoral Award at the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Contemporary. I research how artworks create epistemic spaces for preserving sound and enabling experiences of listening (back) to sounds that have been censored, muted, rendered inaudible and excluded from official and institutional archives. My research argues for the fundamental role of artworks, and the medium of sound, in transitional justice processes. 

In summer 2025, as part of my PhD, I curated the exhibition and live programme Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen (Nottingham Contemporary), which considered how sound travels through cross-cultural identities, histories, and futures in artworks by multi-generational, international artists that ‘listen back’ to uncover silenced or disappeared histories while creating new moments to receive and hold historical dissonance. 

My PhD thesis will expand the exhibition into a discursive space with interpretation of many of the artworks featured and in-depth curatorial reflections on working with Satch Hoyt, Dylan Robinson, and Hong-Kai Wang. Many of the artworks reveal how entangled listening and hearing are with our environment, and how colonialism and the dispossession of land shapes our senses and our memories. In both my research and curatorial work, I am interested in how power and technology shape perception and memory, and how the supposed authority of sound recordings and official archives does not fully capture sound’s relational and affective power.