28th April 2026
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM 
Birmingham School of Art, B3 3BX
£5.00 (plus booking fee) Tickets

We are delighted to host a talk by Joy Gregory, a graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, has developed a practice focused on social and political issues, particularly exploring history and cultural differences in contemporary society. One of her notable contributions is challenging the conventional notions of beauty and its language in relation to race and gender. Autoportrait 1990, for example, comprises of a series of self-portraits of the artist made in response to the lack of presentations of Black women’s beauty. It was published time in Ten8’s ‘Critical Decade’ accompanied by Stuart Hall’s essay on representation. Gregory is associated with Black British photography movement, alongside artists such as Sunil Gupta and Roshini Kempadoo who were also considering notions of cultural difference through their photography. Gregory has worked closely with Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers, with whom she continues to associate to date.

Born in the UK to Jamaican parents, she has always been intrigued by the impact of European history and colonization on global perceptions of identity, memory, folklore, and traditional knowledge. As a photographer, she employs various media, including video, digital and analogue photography, and Victorian print processes. In 2002, Gregory was awarded the NESTA Fellowship, which provided her with the time and freedom to research a significant project on language endangerment. The first instalment of this series was the video piece titled “Gomera,” which premiered at the Sydney Biennale in May 2010.

For nearly three decades, Joy has been involved in art education and served as an Honorary Research Associate at the Slade School of Art [UCL], where she developed new work for the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. In 2019, she received commissions from the Black Cultural Archives to create a new work celebrating the accomplishments of prominent Black British Women including Linda Dobbs and Baroness Doreen Lawrence. In more recent years has worked with a range of institutions making new work in response to their collections including ‘Sweetest Thing’ for RAMM (2022) and ‘A Taste of Home’ for AOTU (2024). In the fall of 2023 she was a Visiting Scholar at Yale Centre of British Art in the USA where she developed on the framework for her latest work ‘The Last Speakers’. Twenty years in the making this short film completed for her major retrospective Catching Flies with Honey at the Whitechapel Gallery, London accompanied by a major publication of the same name.

Gregory has received numerous awards and has exhibited her work worldwide, participating in various festivals and biennales. In 2019, she was honoured with an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society. She and Whitechapel Gallery are the winners of Freelands Award 2023. Her work can be found in esteemed collections such as the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection. Currently residing and working in London, she teaches Fine Art Photography at Camberwell School of Art, University of the Arts London. Gregory is editor of the book Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain (published 2024), the first anthology in the field in which her work also features.

28th April 2026
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM 
Birmingham School of Art, B3 3BX
£5.00 (plus booking fee) Tickets

Associated Events
Edmund Clark, 10th March, 6:00 PM – 7.30 PM, Birmingham School of Art
Alicia Bruce, 31st March, 6:00 PM – 7.30 PM, Zoom