Acatia joined The Courtauld as the Research Forum Event Producer in March 2020 and was part of the Research Forum team who pivoted the public-facing research event programme to be fully online during the pandemic. In December 2023 Acatia moved to a new position at The Courtauld, as Departmental Administrator for the History of Art department. She continues to work in administering and supporting the work of The Courtauld’s Decolonising Action Groups.
Acatia was awarded her PhD in 2018, which was completed through a Collaborative Doctoral Award with the University of Exeter and Tate. Her thesis was titled ‘The Value of Performance Documentation in the Contemporary Art Museum: A Case Study of Tate‘.
She was a pre-doctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project ‘Performance at Tate: Collecting, Archiving and Sharing Performance and the Performative’ (2014 -2016), a research assistant in the pilot year of the Horizon-funded research project ‘A Cartography of Socially-Engaged, Participatory Art Practices’ (2016-2017), and a freelance researcher on the ‘Documentation and Conservation of Performance‘ (2016 – 2021) project with Tate’s Time-based Media Conservation team.
Since being awarded her PhD, she has worked as a research assistant on the 2024 book ‘A Sense of Theatre‘ by Richard Pilbrow and as a freelance proof reader on two forthcoming volumes on dance, memory and museums.
Publications:
Finbow, A. (2021) ‘New Approaches to Documenting Performance in the Museum: Value, History and Strategy’, in Moving Spaces: Enacting Dance, Performance and the Digital in the Museum’, eds. Susanne Franco and Gabriella Giannachi:https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni4/libri/978-88-6969-535-3/new-approaches-to-documenting-performance-in-the-m/#!
Giannachi G, Sinker R, Benford S, Finbow A, Hunter H, Ravaglia V, Pringle E, Glover T (2020) ‘The Cartography Project: Towards a Relational Form of Documentation, the Case of Participatory Art Practices in Museums and Art Galleries’, in Digital Cultural Heritage, ed. Horst Kremers: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-15200-0_21
Lawson, L. Finbow, A. Marcal, H. (2019) ‘Developing a strategy for the conservation of performance-based artworks at Tate’, Journal of the Institute of Conservation, 42(2): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19455224.2019.1604396
Finbow, A. (2018) ‘Multiplicity in the documentation of performance-based artworks: Displaying multi-media documentation in Rebecca Horn’s Body Sculptures at Tate’, Journal of New Music Research, 47(3): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09298215.2018.1486432
Giannachi, G; Tolmie, P; Finbow, A (2018) ‘How Tate Modern Became the Musée de la Danse’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 28(2): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10486801.2018.1442830
Finbow, A (2017) ‘Space and value in the contemporary art museum: The journey of a performance document at Tate’, Journal of Art Writing by Students, 3(1): https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jaws.3.1-2.15_1
