Dr Kate Liston

Assistant Professor

School: Design Arts and Creative Industries

I am an Assistant Professor at Northumbria University. I currently lead on two Fine Art Foundation Year and two Year 1 BA Fine Art modules, and I supervise practice-led or interdisciplinary PhDs. Previous to my position here I was an Associate Lecturer at Sunderland University.

I have produced site-responsive artist commissions since 2010, spanning installation, writing and moving-image. I am interested in the ways humans relate to and understand their environments. In research terms this means I engage with cognitive processing, tacit knowledge production and sensory learning within the more-than-human world. In practical terms, it means I respond to ideas and materials which are to hand and work site-responsively. In addition to my solo practice, I collaborate with artist Tess Denman-Cleaver and separately, with an evolving group of staff and students at Northumbria as NEUSCHLOSS.

My own PhD Link Zone: an exploration of the sensation of knowledge through a practice of art and writing (2017) used storytelling and autotheory to challenge presuppositions about the immateriality of knowledge within the academy. I am interested in supervising practice-led PhDs engaging in a broad range of subjects, particularly those seeking to explore embodied knowledge, human / non-human relations, and especially those using writing as practice.

Email Kate

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Sinkhole, Liston, K., Bouttell, S., Wilde, D., Fenton, I., Edmonds, T. 12 May 2025
Spar Box, Liston, K. 25 Apr 2025
The world is reset every night meaning your build will always be temporary, O'Sullivan, T., Liston, K., Guy, L. 10 Oct 2025
The world is reset every night menaing your build will always be temporary, O'Sullivan, T., Liston, K., Guy, L. 18 Oct 2025
Art writing as absorption into the world, Liston, K. 17 Apr 2024, In: Journal of Writing in Creative Practice
Cleaved Into, Jackson, M., Hughes, A., O'Sullivan, T., Guy, L., Liston, K., Danby, C. 8 Mar 2023
LOOP, Liston, K., O'Sullivan, T., Qureshi, A., Reed, G., Sworn, C., Danby, C., Culver, M., Morris, R., Tatham, J. 30 Nov 2023
The Island, the Bench and the Sofa at Home: The archipelago-like network of artists and audiences involved in the exhibition Town Hall Meeting of the Air,2021, and its 2022 tour., Liston, K. 25 Jun 2022, Island Studies International Conference
The Island, the Bench, and the Sofa at Home: Sensations of Communion in the Exhibition Town Hall Meeting of the Air, Liston, K. 3 Jul 2022, 13th SAR Conference 2022
ENTWINED: Rural, Land, Lives, Art, Liston, K., Douglas, S., Fintan, S., Ketteringham, E., Gallagher, C., Coleman, R., Hodges, J., Kennedy, B., O'Sullivan, T. 4 Sep 2021

Professional Activity

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Organising a conference, workshop, ...: Tangible Utopias Symposium 2021
Invited talk: Spar box workshop 2021

PGR Supervision

Kathryn Elkin Full Bodied - New Insights into Voice as Resistance Within the Broadcasting Ban Archive Start Date: 01/10/2025 End Date: 17/10/2025
Rebecca Mather Singing Stories of Creative Sanctuary: A practice ethnography of singing-youth theatre with communities with migration experience Start Date: 17/09/2024
Kathryn Elkin Dubbed From English to English: Voice as resistance through the legacy of The British Broadcasting Ban, Oct 1988-Sept 1994 Start Date: 01/10/2025
Rebecca Mather Singing Stories of Creative Sanctuary: A practice ethnography of singing-youth theatre with communities with migration experience Start Date: 17/09/2024 End Date: 17/10/2025