RAPHAEL VELLA

He was art critic for the Malta Independent between 1992 and 2000 and won the Commonwealth Art and Craft award (London) in 1998. He was artist-in-residence at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand for a year in 2000 and was a founding member of the artists’ group StART in the early 2000s. Raphael Vella was Fulbright scholar in 2001 and has lectured at the University of Malta since 2003.

In 2012-13 he was Artistic Programme Director for Valletta 2018 Foundation, the entity responsible for the European Capital of Culture in 2018. He has published numerous articles and catalogue essays about contemporary art, culture and education and initiated many artistic projects, educational ventures and international exchanges that have helped to transform the cultural scene in Malta, like Divergent Thinkers, the Curatorial School, the Valletta International Visual Arts festival (VIVA) and many projects involving undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Malta.

In 2017, he was co-curator (with Bettina Hutschek) of the Malta Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia. In 2019, he organised the InSEA Seminar Art Education: Conflicts and Connections between 9-11 October in Valletta. Between 2020 and 2023 he is coordinating a University of Malta team working on _Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture _(AMASS), an international research project on socially engaged arts.