Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer.
His moving image, photography, performance and installation work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Konsthall C, Sweden; Courtisane Film Festival, Ghent; Cafe OTO, London; Tokyo Museum of Photography, Tokyo; International Film Festival Rotterdam; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.
His practice remains responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, the cultic milieu, counterculture, ethnography, the built environment, Afro-Caribbean, African American, East Asian and British histories are all mainstays.
He was the recipient of the 2025 Jarman Award. He was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. He was the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg; in 2021, the Best Documentary Short Film Award at Tacoma Film Festival, USA; the Explora Award at Curtocircuito International Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela; the UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal; in 2020, the New Vision Award atCPH:DOX, Denmark and the Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal .
Over the past sixteen years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, the Guardian, numerous others that it’ll be too boring to list here, and helped shape and influence the UK’s new landscape of progressive cultural discourse and debate. A key reference here is his 2017 text The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression, available via the main page.
From 2012 – 2023 he was the producer and presenter of Studio Visit, an interview-based, broadcast radio programme for London’s Resonance 104.4FM. The post-broadcast archive of over 100 interviews can be found here, and includes in depth conversations with Carolee Schneemann, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jimmie Durham, Susan Hiller, Jean Fisher, Andrea Fraser, Kathleen Daniel and Billy Woodberry.
Quaintance’s films are distributed by LUX, London.
Contact:
distribution@lux.org.uk
maquaintance@gmail.com
Seeikokan III (2025) Installation view, John Hansard Gallery
