Tamsin Silvey is Cultural Programme Curator at Historic England, the public body that looks after England’s historic environment.
Since 2015, Tamsin has worked at Historic England commissioning artists, curating exhibitions and developing a cultural programme that explores England’s unique heritage through creative collaborations. Exhibitions include Our Post-War Public Art (2016), I Am London (2016), Immortalised: The People Loved, Left and Lost in Our Landscape (2018) and Human Stories: Another England (2018). Tamsin is developing four years of commissions that celebrate high streets across England as part of the national Cultural Programme of the High Streets Heritage Action Zones (2020-24), the biggest community-led arts and heritage programme in England’s public realm.
In April/May 2020, Tamsin produced Picturing Lockdown, commissioning 10 artists and issuing a public call out for photographs that captured a week of Lockdown in England. This project generated a new collection of photographs made in response to Covid-19 for Historic England’s Archive, the nation’s archive for records of England’s historic buildings, archaeology and social history.
Tamsin specialises in developing and curating contemporary photography projects, and began working in this field in 2008 at cultural consultancy Candlestar, where she worked on the inaugural edition of Photo London fair and managed the Prix Pictet competition and international exhibition tour.
She is part of the steering group for the subject specialist network Photography Collections Network and is a PhD candidate within the History of Art School at Birkbeck, University of London, interrogating how conflict photographs have been curated within temporary exhibitions at British institutions from 2010-20.
