Year 1 Lead Tutor

Rebecca is an artist, writer and curator who has been exhibiting internationally since graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2007. While primarily a painter, her interests include cross-disciplinary approaches to landscape, contemporary Romanticism, synaesthesia and perception, with current curatorial research into the connections between contemporary painting and historical Land Art. She has been a lecturer at West Dean since 2012.  

Year 2 Lead Tutor

George Charman is an artist and lecturer based in London who teaches on the DACC, GD and MFA programmes at West Dean College of Arts and Conservation. Charman's practice-led research focuses on embodied social knowledge, exploring connections between dialogic social experiences and physical sensation in modes of creative production/fabrication.

Critical Studies Lead

Michelle Ussher is a transdisciplinary artist working across painting, textiles, ceramics, text, sound, and performance. Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne in 2002, Ussher's work has been exhibited in the UK, Italy, Switzerland, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. In 2021 she completed an MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory, supervised by Catherine Malabou at the Centre of Research in European Philosophy, Kingston University. 

Associate and Short Course Tutor

Artist, curator, lecturer and writer, Frances is based in Dorset. Her radical landscape practice is site-responsive and specific to place. She has been associated with West Dean College since 1990 (Short Courses, FDAD, DACC) and was artist-in-residence in 2005. Frances trained at Aberystwyth UCW, Wimbledon College of Art (MA Printmaking) and Goldsmiths’ College. 

Associate and Short Course Tutor

Freya trained at Edinburgh College of Art and UAL. She has received residencies from The Royal Scottish Academy, Scottish Arts Council, The Florence Trust, Somerset House, West Dean College and The National Trust. She exhibits regularly in the UK and abroad. Freya is currently undertaking a PhD at the Royal College of Art, examining the role of fine art portraiture within narrative medicine.

Associate Tutor

Ross Taylor is an artist and lecturer based in London. The underlying focus of his research explores historical and contemporary ideas surrounding the portrayal of thought and experience through image. He first came to West Dean in 2018 as the School of Arts artist-in-residence, and has since taught on the DACC and MFA courses. 

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Katharine is an artist who works with ceramics and textiles, primarily concerned with examining her own identity and place in the world as a worker/mother/artist. Following an archaeology degree, an MA in History of Art and a career in higher education in London, Katharine retrained. She was a student on the FDAD and then the DACC programme, concluding her studies in 2019 and has supported the teaching of the DACC since then. During 2020/21 Katharine undertook her first artist residency at Hawthbush Farm in East Sussex and has since had two exhibitions showcasing the work from that residency as well as new work inspired by the Sussex landscape and associated materials research.