2019 Design Trust / RCA Fellowship in Design Curation Announcement

25. 9. 2019

Design Trust and the Royal College of Art are delighted to announce the 2019 Design Trust / RCA Fellow Anne Zhou.

Anne Zhou is starting a year-long fellowship in design curation in Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, UK. Her MA projects explore how everyday products connect our mental and physical worlds. Kinesthetic Time, one of her previous projects, is now on view at the exhibition Provoke, Unlearn, Change: Designing Perspectives, co-organized by Zhou at Venice Design.

Anne Zhou received a BA degree in Art & Architecture from Tufts University in Massachusettes, USA and has recently completed her MA in Design Products, part of Exploring Emergent Futures platform. She worked in New York for three years in architecture, exhibit design, and fabrication. Zhou’s past experiences include experience design for Novartis HQ in Switzerland, interaction design for JPMorgan Chase HQ in New York, and fabrication for large scale installation for SoulCycle. She also founded Stuf, a handbag and leather goods brand in 2015.

The Design Trust/RCA Fellowship in Design Curation was established in 2017 with the generous support of the Trustees and Design Trust, an initiative of the Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design. Open to applicants based in Hong Kong or the Greater Bay Area region, the Fellowship addresses the burgeoning field of design curating in a global context and locates it within the interdisciplinary curatorial field. It enables scholars to carry out research at the RCA, supported by a tailored programme of academic training designed to broaden their knowledge and skills in curatorial practice, theory and understanding of design.

‘We look forward to working with Anne Zhou on a research project that will contribute towards embedding design knowledge into educational and curatorial projects in Hong Kong and the region, not least by developing modes of curating that allow engagement with the rich history of design and making in Hong Kong. The Fellowship will strengthen the exchange of ideas in design curating internationally and build important international links through design histories.” said Dr Sarah Teasley, Head of Programme for History of Design.

DT/RCA Fellows recipients in 2017 include Mina Song who undertook advanced research into the theory and practice of contemporary design curating and created and was placed at the Victoria & Albert museum for 6-months. In 2018, two fellows were selected, Carrie Chan and Sunnie Chan.
Sunnie Chan’s research fellowship at the RCA included a prototyping event ‘Design Curators Clinic’ and a placement at the Learning Department of the V&A Museum, centred on emerging practices of design curating and its contribution to cultural learning. Carrie Chan’s work at the RCA focused on how China's Internet culture is changing self-representation and expression through fashion and wearable artefacts – both objects and images – and developing a curatorial framework for discussing fashion’s social and cultural significance through a virtual and immaterial experience.

More details please visit here: https://www.rca.ac.uk/schools/school-of-arts-humanities/hod/design-trust-rca-fellowship-design-curation-2019/