Amanda Holiday is an artist, poet and filmmaker. She studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art in the 1980s. She made short films for the Arts Council, BFI and Channel 4 and directed educational television programmes for the SABC in South Africa.
Her chapbook ‘The Art Poems’ was published in April 2018 as part of New Generation African Poets. She completed the Creative Writing (Poetry MA) at UEA in 2019 and her writing has appeared various journals and Frieze.
In 2020, she founded the UK’s first crowdfunded poetry press Black Sunflowers focussed on the work of women and black poets. She is currently Techne AHRC doctoral student at the University of Brighton researching black ekphrasis.
Current PhD research: ‘Poetry, Race and Art’.
The two-pronged interdisciplinary approach proposes expansive ways of comprehending ‘pictured blackness’ and offers an embodied and immersive way of understanding ekphrasis, black and even decolonial ekphrases and opens up important interdisciplinary dialogue in this area.
