Chairs / Organisers:

Adam Benmakhlouf

Gabi Barkess-Kerr

(Magazine, Short Film Festival and Art Prize)

Cherie Federico is the Director of Aesthetica Magazine and related events and festivals. Cherie co-founded Aesthetica Magazine in 2002 whilst she was studying for her Masters Degree. The first issue of Aesthetica was published in March 2003 with a credit card and since then the magazine has become one of the leading British art and culture publications with 550,000 readers across print, digital and social media. The publication has national distribution through WHSmith, all the major galleries, WHSmith Travel in train stations and airports, and it is exported to 20 countries.

Cherie is a strong believer in clean design, striking photography, critically engaging content and also bringing the best new contemporary talent to the fore alongside established practitioners. Cherie is Director of the Aesthetica Short Film Festival, which is a BAFTA-Qualifying festival and screens films from over 60 countries, as well as attracting key industry from across with sector.

Cherie is also the Director of the Aesthetica Art Prize, which champions new talent and has 4,500 applications with artists from across the world with artists going on to be commissioned by Absolut Vodka, Channel 4 and participate in biennales and exhibitions worldwide, as well as works being purchased for corporate collections such as Hiscox. Cherie also holds an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts London.

Chris Sharratt is a freelance writer, editor and editorial consultant based in Glasgow. He mostly writes about contemporary art and culture and has contributed to, amongst other publications, Frieze, Art Agenda, ArtReview, Art Quarterly, Art & Education, Sculpture Magazine, TateEtc, The World of Interiors, a-n, and Arts Professional. Chris has also written for many other publications, including: The Guardian, New Statesman, The Sunday Times, Manchester Evening News, Creative Tourist, The Face, i-D and numerous other magazines. For nearly 10 years Chris was an arts editor for Metro newspaper. Prior to that he was editor of the Manchester arts and culture magazine, City Life.

Adam Heardman is a writer and poet from Newcastle upon Tyne, who lives and works in London. Adam writes reviews and features for Frieze and Art Monthly and has also written for Tribune, The Independent, and more. Adam’s poems have been featured in PN Review, Belleville Park Pages, eyot and elsewhere, and have been included in gallery shows at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Berwick Visual Arts.

Lisette May Monroe is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. She works with writing, photography and installation to review her experiences of class, fatness and disability. These works excavate moments of horror and explore them as hauntings or monstrous entities in suburban or peripheral environments. She is interested in the amplification of drama, shame, aspiration, sex and mystery in these contexts and the ways in which she has been consumed and regurgitated by these monsters.

Lisette also runs Rosies Disobedient Press (@rosiesdisobedientpress) with Adrien Hester. Rosie’s is an artist-led publishing project based in Glasgow which focuses on writing from marginalised perspectives with a focus on queer, working class and feminist writers. At its core is a belief in the importance of accessibility to writing. The press works directly with artists to create unique projects on a small scale and across multiple forms, including online and printed publishing, writing, sound and live events. Rosie’s Disobedient Press is the ‘bad dog’ of artist-led publishing.

Maria is a British-Italian writer, artist, translator and co-editor of Nothing Personal Magazine based in Glasgow.

In 2019 she was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and received a Gillian Purvis Trust Award for New Writing. In 2021 she graduated from the Art Writing MLitt at Glasgow School of Art, was commended for her submission to the UEA New Forms Award and won the Yellow Paper Prize for Art Writing. In July 2022 she exhibited Soft Quarry (Column party!) at the Taattinen Residency Summer Exhibition in Finland. She is a co-founder of, and an associate editor for Nothing Personal magazine, a biannual magazine for art, essays and reviews, based in Glasgow. Issue III was released in early November 2022. Nothing Personal provides a platform that combines unparalleled professionalism and sincere experimentation with the form of art criticism.

Engaging Art Worlds: Art Magazines in Focus; MA Contemporary Art Theory by Adam Benmakhlouf and Gabi Barkess-Kerr, November 2023 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA 4.0