Alice Clanachan is Curator, Prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is responsible for prints in the V&A’s collection from 1500 to 1850. Prior to her move to the UK in 2023 she held curatorial roles in prints, drawings and photographs at the Art Gallery of South Australia and Flinders University Museum of Art in Adelaide, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. In 2019 she was awarded the Harold Wright Fellowship which enabled 12 months self-directed study in the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum (completed in 2023 due to COVID-19 closure). She participated in the 2023 BAN Curatorial Forum.
Alice has taught museum and curatorial studies at post-graduate level and has worked as researcher for a project which maps indigenous Australian portraiture in 19th-century print media. She’s curated several contemporary artists’ projects, led touring exhibitions and managed cataloguing, digitisation and provenance research projects.
Alice’s research interests include aspects of Northern Renaissance printmaking, botanical illustration, transnationalism and the artists’ colony in the 19th century, and works on paper which document voyages of discovery and Empire, particularly the British and French colonial projects to the Antipodes. She’s invested in developing strategies for presenting decolonising narratives within contemporary museum practice.
