Carolina Silva is a fellow researcher at Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. She is currently developing the project “Educational provision and professional training for youth in contemporary art museums” in collaboration with the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), in Lisbon. The main goal is to understand how can long-term programmes for youth in contemporary art museums contribute to their personal, social and professional development.

Between 2017 and 2020 she was the Curator: Community Programmes at Whitechapel Gallery, London, where she coordinated the project “Voices that matter: Women, art and collaboration”, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which aimed to enable women from ethnically diverse communities to develop agency and social confidence through art.

She holds a PhD in Educational Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, has a MA in Art Education from the Fine Arts Faculty, University of Lisbon, and a BA in Fine Arts – Painting from the same university. Her PhD thesis was funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and focused on youth forums in contemporary art museums. It combined a genealogical analysis of museums’ turn towards youth in the UK and the US, with an in-depth study of the Whitechapel Gallery’s youth forum, looking into the pedagogies that emerged in their collaborative art practices. She was a visiting doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, with a Fulbright Research Grant.

Between 2010 and 2013 she was part of the research team of the project “Meaning-making and mediation strategies in art museums”, funded by FCT.

Research topics: Arts education; youth studies

Keywords: museum education; contemporary art; youth; participatordy pedagogies; participatory methodologies