Joanne Berry-Frith

Joanne has a PhD in A Framework for Action and Reflection: Using Play to Understand the Relationships between Art Practice and Life Science from Birmingham City University, UK. She has an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from Camberwell College of Art and an MA in Illustration from the Royal College of Art, London.

As well as conducting practice-based research, Joanne exhibits regularly across the UK and internationally, with works held in major collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), Arts Council England (ACE), Nottingham University Medical School, and Zeiss Microscopy Labs, Munich, Germany.

Since 2000, Joanne has successfully secured cumulative funding totalling £206K from organisations including ACE, the Wellcome Trust, AHRC, AHRB, EPSRC, local authorities, Arts for Health, and international industry partners.

One notable project, Hijacking Natural Systems (2012), was funded by the Wellcome Trust, ACE, Derby City Council, and Derby Museum & Art Gallery. This highly successful initiative was nominated by the University of Nottingham for The Times Higher Education Award and cited by the Wellcome Trust as an exemplar of an Arts and Engagement project. Artwork from the project was later featured in the BBC4 series The Beauty of Anatomy (2014, 2017), presented by Dr. Adam Rutherford. Residencies include the Florence Trust, London, and the Natural History Museum (NHM), London.

From 2015 to 2019, Joanne collaborated with scientists at the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Membrane Proteins and Receptors (COMPARE). Between 2016 and 2019, she also worked with the Biofilms Research Centre at Malmö University and the Centre for Cellular Imaging at Gothenburg University, Sweden, using multi-photon microscopy to explore skin as raw data. She developed an art project based on my Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) research conducted in collaboration with the Science Infrastructure Platforms Imaging and Analysis Centre (IAC) at the NHM, London, in 2015 and again in 2024.

For 2025–2026, Joanne has been awarded an ITSS Equipment Sharing Fund from the UK Institute for Technical Skills and Strategy, supporting ongoing collaboration with the Science Infrastructure Platforms Imaging and Analysis Centre at the Natural History Museum, London.

From 2025 to 2030, Joanne is also contributing to

DIALOG: Understanding Disorganisation – A Language-Focused Global Initiative in Psychosis, funded by the Wellcome Trust (Grant no. 314138/Z/24/Z; Award: CAD $9,496,545).

Principal Applicant: Lena Palaniyappan (Douglas Hospital Research Centre, Montreal, Canada).

Co-applicants: Valentina Bambini (Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori di Pavia, Italy), Neil Harrison (Cardiff University, UK), Tilo Kircher (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany), Gina Kuperberg (Tufts University, USA), Susan Rossell (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia), Krish Singh (Cardiff University, UK), and Iris Sommer (Cardiff University, UK).

The DIALOG initiative includes collaborators from multiple international sites (see: Douglas Research Centre).

Joanne is contributing as a practice-based researcher and visual artist (Loughborough University), supporting the project’s knowledge translation arm through visual data montages and art exhibitions that integrate lived experience perspectives. Joanne's prior collaboration with Palaniyappan includes the exhibition Light It Up (joberry.co.uk/commissions/commission/light-it-up).