Gallery Director Maria Balshaw chosen for Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Award
One of five 'cultural entrepreneurs' named as recipients of the 2010 fund
Maria Balshaw, Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery has been named as one of the recipients of the 2010 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund. Maria joined the gallery, part of the University of Manchester in May 2006. An inaugural Clore Leadership Programme Fellow in 2004/05, her professional background spans Arts Council England West Midlands, Creative Partnerships Birmingham and academic posts at the University of Birmingham and University College Northampton.
The Breakthrough Fund grant of £260,000 will, over three years, enable her to conduct research and development as well as provide seed-corn funding for new programming strands that will emerge from the R&D carried out. This will include a part-time sabbatical for Maria over a six-month period, research trips, a new curator-collaborator post for 30 months and a programming fund to explore ways of working differently with the collections, artists and audiences. All of this will take place alongside the major capital redevelopment she is leading at the Gallery, infusing new thinking into a 'new' Whitworth Art Gallery.
Maria says: ""Finding time to develop big ideas and retain the creative side of my director's role at the Whitworth is my perennial challenge. The Breakthrough funding will buy me thinking time at a critical time for me and for the organisation. As we steer through a major capital expansion of the Gallery, I will be able to research and develop some completely new ways of working with our wonderful collection, with artists, our audiences and our new and old spaces. It is so unusual to have the trust of a funder at the beginning of the creation process, so I feel extraordinarily honoured to receive this grant."
Find out more about the 2010 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund, and the five recipients of this year's awards.