Stephen Welsh
Freelance curator, consultant and cultural practitioner
Stephen Welsh (he/him) is a freelance curator, consultant and cultural practitioner specialising in supporting museums and heritage organisations to embed co-creation, diversify decision-making, and prioritise the needs and aspirations of underserved communities.
From 2007 until 2020, he was the Curator of Living Cultures and Acting Deputy Head of Collections at the Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester. In this role, he was responsible for improving community access to a collection of over 18,000 cultural heritage items from Africa, America, Asia, and the Pacific, and in partnership with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Studies, he led the unconditional repatriation of 43 cultural heritage items to Aboriginal communities.
Prior to this, he was a project curator working on the development and delivery of the International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool, from 2005 to 2007.
Since 2016, he has been a committee member for the National Lottery Heritage Fund North, and in 2021 he was appointed as a trustee for Homotopia, the UK's longest-running LGBTQIA+ arts and culture festival.
He served as an advisory panel member for the Arts and Humanities Research Council project Towards an Inclusive GLAM Hub from 2021 to 2022 and has also sat on committees for the Islamic Art and Material Culture Subject Specialist Network and the Museum Ethnographers Group.
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