Oreet Ashery

Oreet Ashery is a transdisciplinary visual artist.  Manifesting through moving image, performance, music and writing, Ashery’s practice engages with biopolitical fiction, autoethnography, gender materiality and potential communities.

She was co-recipient of the Turner Prize 2020; winner of the prestigious Jarman Film Award in 2017 for her web-series Revisiting Genesis, and recipient of a major London-wide commission, Party for Freedom, by ArtAngel in 2013. Her book How We Die Is How We Live Only More So was published by Mousse Publishing in 2019. She is co-convenor of the MFA Fine Art programme and a Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford University.

Her current body of work, Silently Echoing the Unborn, explores – from a loving perspective – the liminal spaces between extinction, dying, living and the unborn. The work critically fictionalises technological interventions into minor forms of human and non-human existence.

Tori Herridge

Tori Herridge an evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London. She is an expert on fossil elephants, particularly those species which lived in Europe during the Ice Age: mammoths and straight-tusked elephants. Her research addresses evolutionary responses to extreme climate change during the Pleistocene period.

Herridge delivered the 2012 Charles Lyell Award lecture at the British Science Festival and co-wrote the film Who Do You Think You Really Are? for the Natural History Museum, winning the Premier Award, Learning on Screen, 2011. She has written for The Guardian and co-presented the Channel 4 documentary Mammoth Autopsy: Return of the Ice Age Giant?, 2014. She presented the 2016 Channel 4 series Walking Through Time; co-presented three series of Britain at Low Tide (2016, 2018 and 2019; and presented Bone Detectives: Britain’s Buried Secrets on Channel 4, 2020. She is a founding editor-in-chief at the open access journal Open Quaternary, and co-founder of TrowelBlazers, which celebrates women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists.