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Sian Bonnell is a UK based artist, curator and publisher living and working in West Yorkshire and is currently Reader in Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University.
TRACE, her curation and publishing project was established in 1999. Artist books published under the imprint TRACE Editions include Wild Track the first book of poetry by Mark Haworth-Booth, Imagine Finding Me by Chino Otsuka and Villa Mona by Marjolaine Ryley. Since 2014 she has curated an annual exhibition of UK graduate photography, featuring over 250 images selected from16 Universities for the Pingyao International Photography Festival held every September in China.
Invited regularly to review portfolios at international photography festivals she has judged major competitions including The Jerwood Photography Prize in 2006 and the Taylor Wessing Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 2009.
Sian was awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society in 2010 the following year she was awarded the Photoworks Senior Research Fellowship at the British School at Rome. Her images have been exhibited and published widely both in the UK and internationally.
Her work is held in many public and corporate collections notably, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, the Ransom Center, Texas and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
Research is divided into many strands concerning photography and its relations with performance/performing for the camera; sculpture/the object and the camera; the dissemination of the photograph, with regard to curation, publishing and the book and its relations with other disciplines such as medicine.