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Towner Eastbourne and Tate are pleased to announce the judging panel who will select the 2023 Turner Prize shortlist. The shortlisted artists will be announced in spring 2023, and an exhibition of their work will open in Eastbourne in September 2023.

The jury for Turner Prize 2023 at Towner is

• Martin Clark, Director, Camden Art Centre

• Cédric Fauq, Chief Curator, Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux 

• Melanie Keen, Director of Wellcome Collection

• Helen Nisbet, Artistic Director, Art Night

One of the best-known prizes for the visual arts in the world, the Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. Established in 1984, the Prize is awarded annually to an artist born, living or working in Britain, for an outstanding exhibition or public presentation of their work anywhere in the world in the previous year.

Each year an expert jury is formed to select a shortlist of artists for the Turner Prize. An exhibition of work by the nominated artists provides a vital public platform for emerging British artists and for visitors to engage with the latest developments in British art. The Turner Prize winner will be awarded £25,000 with £10,000 awarded to the other shortlisted artists at an award ceremony in December 2023.

Joe Hill, Director, Towner Eastbourne, said, “We are pleased that Martin, Cédric, Melanie and Helen will select our shortlist for the 2023 Turner Prize. Their range of experience, locally, nationally and globally will be sure to draw together a fantastic list of artists, who we will be privileged to exhibit in our galleries in 2023. We are delighted that the Turner Prize will be hosted at Towner as an important part of our centenary celebrations, and that this very capable and knowledgeable judging panel will be part of it. Hosting the Turner Prize will be an exciting moment not only for us but for Eastbourne."

Martin Clark has been Director of London’s Camden Art Centre since 2017, prior to which he was Director of Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2013-17), Artistic Director of Tate St Ives (2007-13), and Curator of Exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol (2005-7). Over the last 20 years he has curated more than 80 exhibitions, including recent solo shows with Allison Katz, Lily van der Stokker, Walter Price, Julien Creuzet, Amy Sillman, Jesse Darling, Olga Balema, Dani and Sheilah ReStack, and Phoebe Collings-James; as well as group exhibitions including The Botanical Mind, Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree, Camden Art Centre (2020), Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm, Art Sheffield (2016) and The Dark Monarch, Magic and Modernity in British Art, Tate St Ives (2009). He writes widely on modern and contemporary art and is an advisor for Art on the Underground.

Cédric Fauq joined Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in September 2021 where he has since curated the group exhibitions Barbe à Papa and The Moonfish Club and worked with artists Olu Ogunnaike and Abbas Zahedi on solo projects. Prior to joining Capc, he was a curator at the Palais de Tokyo (2020 – 2021), where he developed the exhibitions Antibodies, Sarah Maldoror: Tricontinental Cinema and Aicha Snoussi’s Nous étions mille sous la table, and at Nottingham Contemporary where he set up shows (Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance; Sung Tieu: In Cold Print; Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio), performances (Okwui Okpokwasili; Steffani Jemison; Lou Lou Lou Sainsbury) and publications. He also writes and develops freelance projects, the latest include Terminus Mutations at Villa Arson, Nice (2022), Unworlding, Frieze London (2021), and Governmental Fires at Futura, Prague (2021). He co-directed clearview.ltd in London (2016-2018); and was a member of the Baltic Triennial XIII curatorial team (2017-2018).

Melanie Keen is Director of the Wellcome Collection in London, a museum of health and human experience. Under her leadership, there is a strong commitment to reshaping cultural assumptions around race, disability and gender, and the human relationship to planetary health. Recent Wellcome Collection exhibitions have included artists such as Joy Labinjo, Harold Offeh, Dryden Goodwin, Amalia Pica, Forensic Architecture. She was formerly Director and Chief Curator of Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), where she revitalised its mission by placing the Stuart Hall Library at the heart of the organisation’s work. She has worked on several international artists’ solo presentations including Shiraz Bayjoo, Joy Gregory, Li Yuan-chia, Oscar Muñoz, Janette Parris, Keith Piper, Yinka Shonibare. She is an advisor at the Government Art Collection; the Board of Visitors of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; the British Council Collection; and a trustee of Raven Row, London. She was a judge for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2020 and for the Freelands Award 2022. In 2022, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Arts London.

Since 2018 Helen Nisbet has been Director of Art Night, the nationwide biannual contemporary art festival. Previously she held curatorial positions at Cubitt; Arts Council Collection; Open Source festival; the Lighthouse, Glasgow and Contemporary Art Society, and she has contributed to programmes at Creative Time, New York; the Venice Biennale; Hollybush Gardens and The Sunday Painter.  She has curated the exhibition Houses are Really Bodies which explored the writing of Leonora Carrington, along with solo shows of Helen Cammock and Flo Brooks, and major commissions from Zadie Xa, Isabel Lewis, Christine Sum Kim, Imran Perretta and Paul Purgas, Mark Leckey, Alberta Whittle, Keith Piper, Emma Talbot, Oona Doherty and the Guerrilla Girls. Her publications include It Disappears in Blue and Red and Gold (2018) and These are the stones we have instead of trees (2020). She sits on the advisory board for a-n and Art Quest, and she is an Executive Director of Gaada in Shetland.