Education advisors
Ian Mills
Wendy Niblock
Kirstie Skinner
Ian Mills' professional background began in the school education service – initially as a Chemistry teacher leading eventually to Depute Headteacher in a Lanarkshire secondary school. Thereafter he moved to Tayside Region as an Assistant Director of Education where his responsibilities included the arts/education interface and chairing a group which formulated an Arts Policy for Tayside Region. During his time in Tayside he obtained a post graduate degree in Public Policy from Strathclyde University.
In 1995, at the time of local government reorganisation, he was appointed Director of Education in East Dunbartonshire Council but retained an interest at national level in artseducation matters serving as an Adviser to CoSLA and the Scottish Arts Council.
Following a council management restructuring in 2001, he took the opportunity to make a career change as General Manager of the National Youth Choir of Scotland – a post which combined his professional experience in the arts/education field with a life long interest in choral singing (he is a member of the RSNO Chorus). From Autumn 2007 he will be pursuing a freelance career in arts/education consultancy work.
Ian is Chairman of the Scottish Amateur Music Association and Administrator of the Scottish International Piano Competition.
Since 1994 Wendy Niblock has been self-employed as a freelance Arts Administrator and Arts Publicist/Marketer as well as co-ordinating the East Glasgow Youth Theatre (a fully integrated youth theatre based in the East End of Glasgow). In that time, her work has involved fundraising and general administration duties as well as the development and management of high profile press and marketing campaigns and audience development strategies. She is also the administrator of Tricky Hat Productions, a drama and theatre based company that works with vulnerable people of all ages.
Kirstie Skinner is a writer and lecturer specialising in contemporary art. Since 2000, she has organised conferences, talks, programmes and tours for the National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow City Council (Glasgow Art Fair, RAW and Glasgow International), and the Scottish Arts Council. In 2003, she established a contemporary art members group called Spin for the National Galleries of Scotland and the Contemporary Art Society, and continued as Programme Co-ordinator until 2005. She organised a Scottish Arts Council professional development trip to Venice with Emma Nicolson in 2005, and will be leading a similar trip to Documenta 12 and Munster Sculpture Projects in September 2007. In 2006, she filmed a series of interviews with Scottish curators and created a website for the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland.
Kirstie is currently completing her doctoral research on minimalism and installation art at Edinburgh College of Art, where she also taught for several years. Published essays include ‘The self as a screen’ (Journal for Visual Art Practice, 3:1, 2004), ‘The Picture and the Step’ (Jan de Cock, 2005), ‘Camera Perspective’ (Dispatch 114, Norwich Art Gallery, 2005), and ‘Framing consciousness in the 1960s’ (Henry Moore Institute and Ashgate, forthcoming). Kirstie is on the board of the Collective Gallery. |