Professor Maria Fusco

Dr Maria Fusco is Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. She is a working-class Belfast-born interdisciplinary writer working across art writing, fiction, performance and theory and holds a PhD from the School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, University of Edinburgh.



Previously, she was Professor at Northumbria University, Reader at University of Edinburgh and Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London and Senior Research Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam through 2018: currently she’s a visiting Professor at Hochschule fur Gestaltung (Frankfurt). She is a tutor on hybrid and experimental writing courses at Arvon and Faber Academy.



Her practice-led research is award-winning, has been translated into twelve languages and is commissioned by leading international bodies and publishers including: Artangel, Art Metropole (Toronto), BBC Radio 4, Book Works, Creative Time (NY), National Theatre Wales, Routledge, The Royal Opera House and funded by bodies such as the AHRC, Arts Council England, Art Fund, The British Council, The Carnegie Trust, Creative Scotland and The Wellcome Trust.

Current research is in three interrelated strands: dialect and ‘non-standard English’ in international critical art writing; fiction as a critical tool in contemporary art, performative writing methodologies. She is currently working on new projects with Museum for the Home and Royal Opera House.



Her latest sole-authored books are Who does not envy with us is against us: essays on working-class-ness as method (2023) “a testament to Fusco’s analytical and lyric genius, and her ability to move and affect” Isabel Waidner, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer (2017) described by Chris Kraus as "a new classic of female philosophical fiction", Give Up Art: Collected Critical Writings (2018) of which James Elkins had written "after a book like this, most nonfiction seems curiously unaware of what writing can be."



She is Editorial Director of The Happy Hypocrite, an annual journal for experimental writing, has been invited Writer-in-Residence at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Lisbon Architecture Trienale and Whitechapel Gallery (London): she is an Hawthornden Fellow and recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.



With extensive experience in research, teaching and peer review nationally and internationally, she is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, International Association of Art Critics, and has acted as board member, judge, nominator, and trustee for numerous galleries and publishers, recently including: Andy Warhol Foundation (NY), Emily Carr University Press (Vancouver), Goldsmiths Press, LUX, Paul Hamlyn Award, Women’s Art Library.



Maria is interested in hearing from potential PhD candidates working in research areas such as: art writing; artists’ novels; creative/critical hybrids; dialect writing; DIY & independent publishing; experimental writing; interdisciplinary writing; writing for performance.