Louisa Elderton

Louisa Elderton is the Managing Editor for ICI Berlin Press, where she guides the planning of the programme and leads on ensuring the quality of publications, overseeing all aspects of editing and production, and liaising with authors, copy-editors, translators, copyright holders and production staff. She also leads on social-media strategy and managing relationships with bookshops for distribution, and generally promotes the visibility of the publishing house, among other responsibilities.

As a trained specialist in art history, she also works as an independent art critic and writer, and often writes about the subject of painting. She has contributed texts on artists such as John Akomfrah, Faith  Ringgold, and Senga Nengudi to Phaidon’s acclaimed ‘Vitamin’ series, and is the Editor of monographs on the painters Francesco Clemente and Rachel Howard. As a regular contributor to publications like Artnet News, Frieze, and Flash Art, shehas also written for many more such as The New York Times, Apollo, Artforum, Artsy, Mousse, Art Basel, Art Monthly, and Art Review, to name a few, as well as writing essays for gallery and museum catalogues including MASS MoCA, KINDL Berlin, and Almine Rech.

As a teacher, she has delivered seminars and created courses on art writing and editing for Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Art and Berlin Art Institute. Her 2025 course for the Summer Academy, ‘Becoming Writing: Navigating the World Through the Written Word’, centres the creative and personal imperatives of writing about art.

With significant experience of working for cultural institutions, from 2019–22 she was the Curatorial Editor at Gropius Bau, writing exhibition texts and leading on editing books with Yayoi Kusama, Otobong Nkanga, Lee Mingwei, Thea Djordjadze, Dayanita Singh, and more, as well as being an Editor of their Online Journal. She was Chief Editor of Side Magazine for Bergen Assembly 2022. Prior to this, for the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, she was Managing Editor of three books, co-published by Hatje Cantz: Leonilson, BLESS and Poetics of Encryption.

From 2016–21, she was a Project Editor for Phaidon and Content Editor of their book Great Women Artists. From 2011–16, she was a Curator & Artist Liaison at Blain|Southern, making exhibitions and books with Wim Wenders, Lawrence Weiner, Francesco Clemente, and Yinka Shonibare MBE, among others.

She has a first-class honours Bachelor’s degree in ‘English Literature & Art History’, and a Master’s degree in ‘Curating the Art Museum’ from The Courtauld Institute of Art, as part of which she worked in the Research department at Tate writing about works in the collection facing obsolescence. She is originally from London, and has lived in Berlin since 2015.

www.louisaelderton.com