Dr Danielle (Dani) Child is an art historian (modern and contemporary) and Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Manchester. Her research adopts an historical materialist approach to explore the relationship between contemporary art and capitalism through the lens of labour. This interest includes social (collective, participatory and public) artistic practices, contracted labour (the ‘invisible hands’ of production) in art, and contemporary art and social class.
Dani has published articles in Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Art & the Public Sphere and Sculpture Journal, including ‘“The Great Escape”: The Visibility of Class in Tracey Emin’s Margate’ (Oxford Art Journal, 2022). In 2015 she guest edited an issue of Anarchist Studies dedicated to the British art critic Herbert Read.
Dani is currently co-Lead (with Dr Dave Beech) on the AHRC-funded Mapping Creative Labour in Contemporary Art network. She is also co-host (with Dr Sarah Scarsbrook) of the podcast Classed Acts in which we talk with invited guests about life as a creative/educator coming from working class origins. Her book Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism was published in January 2019 with Bloomsbury Academic and she is currently working, as editor, on The Routledge Companion to Art and Capitalism.
