Programme Director of Fine Art
Dr Michael Lent is an artist, researcher, curator and author who leads the Fine Art programmes at Canterbury. Key to this is a strong committed to social justice, inclusion, and diversity – seen as an integral thread in the course, informed by internationalism and intersectionality. His progressive pedagogic background focuses on consultation, consensus decision making, and collaboration.
Bio
Dr Michael Lent is an artist, researcher, and academic working with visual and textual media. He investigates non-productive expenditure in art and culture and specifically how these ideas relate to space.
He received a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Lincoln, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College in Vermont, USA and a BFA in both Painting and Sculpture with an additional focus in Art History from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA and Rome, Italy. Dr Lent has been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2013.
Dr Lent’s research monograph Courting Dissolution was published by Transcript in Europe and Columbia University Press in North America. His work has exhibited widely in museums such as Albright-Knox Art Gallery and MassMOCA in the USA. He has served as Curator at the Tollbooth Gallery and Critical Line in the US and has had funding and awards for his projects through the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Washington State Arts Commission.
Research statement
Dr Lent’s research interests include: accursed share, alterity, anti-architecture, art history, conceptual art, crazed modernists, critical theory, destruction, difference, disappearance, entropy, ephemerality, exchange, formlessness, fragmentation, general economy, image, landscape, liminality, materiality, minimalism, mobility, pataphysics, polemics, queer studies, radicality, raw phenomenology, sacrifice, singularity, space and place.
Research outputs
Dr Lent has submitted the maximum number of outputs to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise in both 2014 and 2021.
Research supervision
Dr Lent has supervised a number of practice-based and traditional PhD students to completion in the fields of History and English as well as those in Fine Art working with cross-disciplinary methodologies (topics ranging from fascism, historicising British feminist artists, alternative pedagogies, Anthropocene and interspecies collaboration, disability, art therapy, and performance art).
I have external examined for BA, MA, and MFA courses for the University of Chester and the Open University, as well as served as viva examiner for PhD students.