Queerness in Nature and Other LGBTQ+ Stories

Take a pride-themed tour of some new projects celebrating diversity and inclusion up and down London’s Exhibition Road in South Kensington.

Hosted by the Queer Heritage Collections Network’s Dan Vo, who also founded the award winning volunteer-led LGBTQ Tours at the V&A, Dan will be joined by guests from the Natural History Museum, Royal Albert Hall, and the University of Leeds. Together they will present exciting projects, and the people behind them, that focus on LGBTQ+ audiences, histories and research.

Speakers:

• Liz Harper, Archive Manager at the Royal Albert Hall, who will share the Royal Albert Hall’s historic role in providing London’s LGBT+ communities with a safe space.
• Aydan Greatrick is a Project Officer on the ESRC-funded Impact Acceleration Account project Pride in the Field: Promoting Inclusive Fieldwork Spaces for LGBTQ+ Workers in Research, Policy & Practice, led by Martin Zebracki at the University of Leeds.
• Florence Okoye is a user researcher and user experience designer at the Natural History Museum. Her work explores how creative methods can be used to understand people's perceptions of natural history and how participatory approaches can both engage and reveal untold stories.
• Maude Willaerts is an Assistant Curator in the Furniture, Textiles & Fashion department at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Maude will present the V&A Design 1900-Now galleries, its bold new curatorial narrative, and focus on new acquisitions and objects representing and talking of experiences of the LGBTQI+ community.
• Dan Vo is course leader of the Gap Year London programme at Sotheby's Institute of Art and was course leader of 'A Queer History of Objects' for V&A Academy. He is co-project manager of the Queer Heritage and Collections Network, supported by the Art Fund and the National Heritage Lottery Fund, as well as a patron of LGBT+ History Month.