Dr Charlotte Frost

Bio

As a curator, researcher and educator, Charlotte has held senior roles across the academic and creative sectors in the UK, Europe, the United States and Asia. Her work consistently bridges rigorous scholarship with hands-on cultural production and organisational leadership, from writing the first history of art criticism's move online to producing award-winning exhibitions and leading multi-million-pound knowledge exchange programmes.

Charlotte is Principal Investigator on Community Conversations with Sidney Cooper: AI-Mediated Living Archive, a knowledge exchange collaboration with the Sidney Cooper Trust and The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge. The project is developing an interactive AI recreation of this somewhat forgotten Victorian painter (who founded the art school that became UCA Canterbury), allowing the public to hold conversations about his life, ideas and legacy. Beyond the prototype, the research establishes ethical frameworks for creating AI avatars of historical figures and pioneers a new model of living archivisation, in which community stories and memories are gathered into the system so that the archive grows and changes with the people it represents.

As Associate Dean at UCA Canterbury, Charlotte has led the development of the campus Industry Engagement Plan, exploring new income streams and commercial offerings that connect the School's expertise in fabrication, design research and heritage innovation with businesses and cultural organisations across Kent. She is establishing a Creative Business Incubator to support graduate entrepreneurship and address regional graduate retention, and has secured an eighteen-month city-centre public presence for the School through the Clocktower Gallery. She is building a practice-led programme of research in future heritage, connecting UCA's creative and digital expertise with Canterbury's heritage, culture and tourism sectors. She is also working with the campus community to reimagine shared spaces and deliver cost-effective upgrades and enhance experience.

Before joining UCA, Charlotte was Programme Manager of the Games and Innovation Nexus (GAIN), a £2.3 million UKRI-funded knowledge exchange programme connecting three universities (including UCA) with their regional games industry clusters. She oversaw three activity streams alongside partnership development, a cross-cluster steering committee, and reporting to funders including UKRI/Research England and county councils. In particular this project demonstrated the less linear route for creative tech transfer and developed a model for university and games industry collaboration.

Prior to this Charlotte was Co-Director of Furtherfield, London's longest-running art and technology organisation and an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. She led organisational strategy and operational delivery across programme, communications, HR and governance, and devised and executed a comprehensive change management plan. Working with Co-Director and Co-Founder, Ruth Catlow, she produced: UNINVITED by Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN, winner of the Lumen Prize Gold Award; CultureStake, a DCMS-funded blockchain platform pioneering community cultural decision-making; The People's Park Plinth, a programme of augmented reality artworks selected by public vote; Citizen Sci-Fi, a three-year programme of locally-led explorations of urban green space stewardship; and The Treaty of Finsbury Park, a five-year live action role play in which human, animal and plant inhabitants of a park negotiated agreements for cooperation. This work was supported by funders including Arts Council England, the British Council, DCMS, and EU Horizon 2020.

Charlotte's academic career includes a tenure-track post as Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, where she led undergraduate modules in art history, contemporary art, art criticism, new media art, and digital communications. Her innovative blended learning approaches were nominated for a Hong Kong Teaching Award and attracted national press coverage. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Digital Humanities centre, HUMlab, at Umeå University, Sweden, and at the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has given keynote lectures at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Duke University, the NEoN Digital Arts Festival and the Art Libraries Society annual conference, was plenary speaker at THATCamp CAA in Chicago, and has delivered invited lectures at institutions including the Australian National University, University College London, the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, Linz. She has presented at more than fifteen international conferences including AAH, CAA, CHArt and ISEA (in 2016 she was on the Hong Kong ISEA selection committee and led the social programme).

Charlotte is the author of Art Criticism Online: A History (Gylphi, 2019), the first history of art criticism's migration to networked culture, and has published in peer-reviewed journals including Leonardo, with book chapters for Routledge, University of California Press, Intellect, Ashgate and Thick Press. She was formerly Series Editor of the Arts Future Book series at Gylphi, and has served as a founding member of the College Art Association's Digital Humanities Committee and on its Intellectual Property Committee. She began her career as a freelance art critic, writing reviews and criticism for publications including The Guardian, Art Quarterly, Mute, Convergence and Rhizome. She founded PhD2Published and AcWriMo, academic writing support networks reaching a community of over 40,000 researchers.

Charlotte is Co-Chair of the CHEAD Innovation and Knowledge Exchange Forum and sits on the Advisory Board of the Sidney Cooper Trust. She holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, an MA in Arts Criticism and Management from City, University of London, and a BA (Hons) in History of Art from the University of Leeds. She is a Fellow of the RSA and an EMCC-accredited leadership coach with a focus on creative leadership. Outside the university she is a practising silversmith, and has volunteered as a Rape Crisis worker and trainer from 2021 - 2026.