Dr Helena Bonett (she/her)

Dr Helena Bonett joined University of Exeter in May 2025 as Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curation (Education & Research). She teaches on the MA Curation: Contemporary Art and Cultural Management as well as supporting the BA Art History & Visual Culture within the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies. 

Helena is a curator, researcher and lecturer with substantial and unique experience working across academic and museum and gallery spaces over her career spanning over two decades – including curating, researching, programming, educating, publishing and project managing in arts institutions including Dorich House Museum, Tate, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Midlands Arts Centre and teaching and researching at University of Exeter, Birkbeck College, Kingston University, London Metropolitan University, Anglia Ruskin University, Central Saint Martins, the Royal College of Art and University of Kent. 

Helena has a PhD in Curating Contemporary Art gained through an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctorate she set up between Tate and the Royal College of Art. Her doctoral research focused on the legacy of the British modernist sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903­­–1975) at Tate with a particular focus on the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St Ives, Cornwall. Hepworth’s legacy at Tate served as the case study for this research in its exploration of questions of value formation and knowledge production in relation to artistic legacy and its interpretation and mediation within a museological context.

Helena’s research utilises participatory curatorial research methodologies as a means of unlocking cultural meaning with a particular focus on creative and museological spaces – including artists’ studios and homes that have been curated into museums – and objects – including personal objects, tools and miscellanea that tell different stories of artists’ lives and experiences. Her current research utilises participatory curatorial methods to shift traditional museological heritage framings of artists’ legacies to include those whose legacies and knowledges have traditionally been marginalised, owing principally to the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class.

In addition, Helena is a qualified therapist – having completed a postgraduate diploma in humanistic counselling and psychotherapy with a clinical placement in 2024 – and views her therapeutic practice as part of a continuation of her curatorial practice in their concentration on co-creation, the relational and an ethics of care and trust. 

Highlights:

• Over 2024–25, Helena worked as a researcher on the AHRC-funded project Museum Closure in the UK 2000–2025 as part of Birkbeck’s Mapping Museums Lab.
• In 2023, Helena was awarded funding from Kingston University to undertake research for her project Diversifying Curatorial Methods in the Studio-Museum, looking at how studio-museums can be exclusionary because of their curatorial methods and representational practices. She travelled to the US to interview curators and evaluate the studio-museums of Native American sculptor Chief Lelooska in Ariel, WA and African American sculptor Dr James W. Washington in Seattle, WA to explore alternative methods for curatorial practice. She is currently developing this research into a short film, journal article and funding application.
• In 2022–23, Helena was a postdoctoral researcher at Kingston University on the project Making it Home: An Aesthetic Methodological Contribution to the Study of Migrant Home-Making and Politics of Integration (MaHoMe), funded by NordForsk and the ESRC, where she worked with a cross-university, cross-disciplinary team at Lund University, Sweden and Roskilde University, Denmark and is currently writing up her research for a book publication.
• Helena edited the online research publication The Squatter Years: Recovering Dorich House Museum’s Recent Past (2019–21) and co-authored a new museum guidebook and interpretation materials for Dorich House Museum, the former studio-home of the sculptor Dora Gordine (1895–1991).
• Helena has curated a number of research events and programmes, such as the symposium Global Communities: Curating Modern Art Today (Tate St Ives, 26–27 April 2019), which she co-convened with curators Biung Ismahasan, Nephertiti Oboshie Schandorf, and Rachel Rose Smith and with keynote talks by Katya García-Antón (then director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and editor of Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism (2018)), and artist Lubaina Himid (2017 Turner Prize winner, Professor of Contemporary Art at University of Central Lancashire, and then artist-in-residence at Porthmeor Studios) in conversation with artist Evan Ifekoya. 
• Helena directed the film, Trewyn Studio (2015), for the Tate St Ives Artists Programme on the former studio-home of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth in St Ives, Cornwall.
• Helena has previously delivered pioneering online research publications at Tate, The Camden Town Group in Context (2012) and The Art of the Sublime (2013), and has also curated numerous research events, public programmes and exhibitions at Tate, Dorich House Museum, the Royal Academy, Kingston University and the Royal College of Art. 
• Helena has delivered research outputs supported by a range of funders, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, Economic and Social Research Council, Friends of Heritage Preservation, Getty Foundation, National Lottery Heritage Fund, NordForsk, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, and by private donation.