Tanya Bentley is Curator, Contemporary, at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She has contributed to recent publications including Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting (2026), Francis Bacon: Human Presence (2024), Icons & Identities (2020), Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life (2018) and Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask (2017). Bentley was the curator of the HSFKramer Portrait Award in 2024 and 2026 and of the Lucian Freud Archive at the National Portrait Gallery from 2023-26. She is one of the hosts of the podcast Understanding British Portraits.Jarvis Cocker is a musician and broadcaster from the north of England. He formed the band Pulp in 1978, whilst at secondary school. They went on to become one of the most successful UK groups of the 1990s. Between 2009 and 2017 he presented the BBC 6 Music programme ‘Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service’ as well as the ongoing, award-winning BBC Radio 4 documentary series ‘Wireless Nights’. He has honorary doctorates from both Sheffield Hallam University and Central Saint Martin’s School of Art (which he attended 1988–91). His lyric collection Mother, Brother, Lover was published by Faber in 2011. Good Pop, Bad Pop, his first work of long-form prose, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. The Sunday Service returned in 2026 as ‘Someday Service’. In May 2027 The Hodge Podge – an exhibition co-curated with Kim Sion – will open at the Hepworth, Wakefield. Cocker divides his time between London and the Peak District. His star sign is Virgo.Amy Emmerson Martin is a curator and writer. She was Contemporary Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London where she worked on exhibitions, acquisitions and collection displays, and previously Assistant Curator of Contemporary British Art at Tate, where she was the Co-Curator of Turner Prize 2024 and Curator of Tate’s Art Now programming, as well as curating displays of the work of international artists. Emmerson Martin’s book on the work of Louise Bourgeois was published in 2026 by Tate. She holds a BA in Art History and an MA in Art History, both from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.Marco Livingstone is an art historian, writer and independent curator who has published widely on art since the 1960s, particularly on Pop Art and figurative painting. His major monograph on Peter Blake (2009, expanded for Thames & Hudson in 2022) is among his books on contemporaries including Patrick Caulfield, Jim Dine, David Hockney, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Paula Rego, Joe Tilson and Caroline Walker. His Pop Art: A Continuing History (Thames & Hudson, 1990), a standard reference on the subject, is complemented by the catalogues of the museum surveys on the movement that he has curated for the Royal Academy among other institutions.Mary McCartney is a photographer, director, author and activist. Her photographs have been featured in exhibitions and publications worldwide, and are held in major private and public permanent collections including the National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts and Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Her first feature documentary, If These Walls Could Sing (2023), was selected to premiere at the Telluride film festival and was nominated for a Critic’s Choice documentary award. She is a co-founder of the global collective Meat-Free Monday. Her books range from photobooks to cookery books, with her latest, Feeding Creativity, published by Taschen in 2023.Clare Preston is a freelance writer and editor. For over twenty years, until 2020, she was responsible for research and publications at Waddington Galleries, now Waddington Custot, in London, representatives for Peter Blake. One of the numerous exhibition catalogues she produced was Peter Blake: Portraits and People (2015). More recently, she has compiled and edited several monographs, including Barry Flanagan (Waddington Custot, 2017), Peter Blake: Collage (Thames & Hudson / Waddington Custot, 2021) and Yoshitomo Nara (Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2025). In preparation for Peter Blake: Collage, she spent time conducting research in the artist’s studio.Natalie Rudd is an art historian, curator and writer. Early in her career, she assisted Peter Blake on the curation of his Tate Liverpool exhibition About Collage, in 2000. She went on to write his 2003 monograph for Tate Publishing, and recently interviewed him for the publication, Peter Blake: Collage (Thames & Hudson, 2021). Natalie has written widely on modern and contemporary art. Her publications include The Self‑Portrait (Thames & Hudson, 2021) and Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2023), as well as monographic essays on artists such as Tess Jaray, Paul de Monchaux and Veronica Ryan. Natalie studied History of Art at King’s College, Cambridge, and completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2025.
