Dr Marcus Jack is a curator, art historian, and Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at the University of Edinburgh. His research looks for counternarratives in visual culture through analyses of infrastructure, statehood, and the socio-economics of marginality, with particular emphasis on artists’ film and video. Jack has held academic posts at the University of Exeter (Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curation, 2023–2025), The Glasgow School of Art (AHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022–2023), and was a visiting researcher with the Archive/Counter-Archive project at York University, Toronto (2022). He is currently developing a full-length monograph on the history of artists’ film in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). His recent curatorial projects include DOWSER (2020–2024), an open-access serial for new writing and archival republication which faces the histories and futures of artists’ moving image in Scotland, and CINEMA DESPITE (Tramway, Glasgow, 2023), a major review of artists’ film and video in Scotland featuring the work of twenty-nine artists, filmmakers and collectives. He was Programme Lead at the Scottish Contemporary Art Network (2022–2023) and as founder of Transit Arts has curated screening programmes with arts organisations across the UK since 2015.
Marcus represented the Early Career Curators Group on the BAN Steering Group in 2019-20, and was the Emerging Curators Group Continuity Representative for 2021. He was the guest convenor British Art after Britain, the British Art Network’s 2023 Annual Conference.
