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Professor Emeritus Andrew Brewerton
Professor Emeritus
<p dir="ltr">Andrew Brewerton is Professor Emeritus at Arts University Plymouth, where he served Principal & Chief Executive from 2010 until his retirement in 2021 following a 27–year career in Higher Education. He led the University’s 2014 transfer into the HE sector, its 2019 achievement of Taught Degree-Awarding Powers, and its successful 2019 application for University Title conferred in 2022. Under his leadership, AUP’s learning environment, campus workshop and studio facilities underwent a significant transformation, key institutional partnerships were developed including Tate Exchange, the British Council’s Crafting Futures programme and FutureLab in Shanghai, and the university’s biennial Making Futures symposium extended to invitation editions at Beijing Design Week, at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea and in the Philippines. Andrew was founding Chair of Governors and Director of Trustees of the Plymouth School of Creative Arts at The Red House, 2012-19.</p>
<p dir="ltr">A former Principal of Dartington College of Arts, and Dean of Art & Design and Professor of Glass at the University of Wolverhampton, Andrew is an English graduate of Cambridge University and from 1984 worked for a decade in glass crystal manufacturing, for five years in production at Stuart Crystal and then as head of design and development at Dartington Crystal. He has held international academic appointments at the Università dell’Aquila, Italy, as Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, and as Visiting Professor at the School of Fine Arts at Nanjing Normal University.</p>
<p dir="ltr">He has served on numerous national bodies including the National Council of Arts Council England and the Creative Industry Federation’s UK Advisory Council, and was Vice-Chair of GuildHE, UKADIA, and the Prime Minister’s Initiative (PMI2) for International Education. Andrew was Chair of Trustees of Plymouth Arts Cinema and has been an Advisor to the Cultural Learning Alliance, Crafts Council Education Advisory Group and the Sorrell Foundation.</p>
<p dir="ltr">His academic leadership internationally has involved the catalytic development of academic glass programs at Shanghai University and Tshwane University of Technology (Pretoria), as well as public art projects in China and the UK. He was an Advisory Board member of the Shanghai International Art City (SIAC) project, and his work in Chinese art & design education was one of only two non-Chinese subjects chosen for a series of ten book-length monographs, <em>Classic Masters of Art Education</em>, published in Shanghai in 2011.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Andrew has lectured and published internationally – most recently on the South Korean artist Chun Kwang Young’s solo show at this year’s Venice Biennale and at the Bund der Kunsthandwerker Baden Württemberg in Stuttgart. He is the author of more than sixty journal and catalogue essays and books on glass and contemporary art, including essays on glass artists including Anne Wolff, Antoine Leperlier and Keith Cummings, the Chinese performance artist He Yunchang, the painter Xue Guangchen and on the installation artist Michael Petry. <em>Glass Tantra</em>, his book on Buddhism in the glass art of Yang Hui-shan, was published in Taipei (2012) and Shanghai (2013). </p>
<p dir="ltr">Andrew’s poetry publications include Via (2010); <em>Raag Leaves for Paresh Chakraborty</em> (2008); <em>Cade l’uliva</em> (2003) and <em>Sirius</em> (1995), and his work was cited in ‘Poetry after 1970’ in <em>The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature</em> (Cambridge University Press, 2004).<br /></p>