Alison Jackson, a contemporary BAFTA- and multi-award winning artist, explores the cult of celebrity – an extraordinary phenomenon created by the media, publicity industries and the public figures themselves. Her work raises questions about fake news and alternative facts. She makes convincingly realistic work about celebrities doing things in private using cleverly styled lookalikes. Likeness becomes real, and fantasy touches on the believable. She creates scenarios we have all imagined but never seen before.

She explores our desire to get personal with the celebrities fired by our voyeurism. By making photographs that seem to show our favourite celebrities (Diana, Kim K or Brad Pitt) doing what we really, secretly, want to see them doing.

She has been featured in a number of publications, including Who’s Who, Private 2004, Penguin Books; Confidential: What you see in this book is not ‘real’ 2007, Taschen; Up the Aisle, 2011, Quadrille publishing, Stern Fotographie 70 (2012, teNeues;), and Private, (2016 published by AJ Publishing).

Her work has been acquired by many public museum collections, including: The Parliamentary Art Collection, London; The National Portrait Gallery, London; SF MOMA, San Francisco; The Royal College of Art, London; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Brussels; The Frances Foundation Paris; The International Centre of Photography amongst others.

Ben Preston is a British journalist. He is an executive editor and Culture Editor of The Sunday Times and a former deputy editor of the Times and editor of Radio Times. 

He began his career in 1987, working on local newspapers (Bristol Evening Post). He worked later for the Press Association as education correspondent before joining The Times. He was The Times deputy editor from 2000 to 2008 and Acting Editor for nine months. Subsequently, he was Executive Editor at The Independent from 2008 before joining Radio Times in 2009.

He was awarded Editors’ Editor in the 2016 BSME awards. He returned to newspapers at The Sunday Times, overseeing news through Brexit and Covid before taking charge of Culture last summer.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Latinx Art Award, a Fulbright fellowship and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions.

Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. She is a Professor of Art at Cooper Union.

Fusco is currently preparing new works for the next Sharjah Biennial and a solo retrospective that will open in 2023.

Trevor Phillips is a writer and television producer. He is the co-founder of the data analytics consultancy Webber Phillips, and Chairman of Green Park Interim and Executive Search. He is a Times columnist, shortlisted for Comment Writer of the Year in 2020.

He is the Chairman of the global freedom of expression campaign charity Index on Censorship; a Senior Fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank; and a Vice-President of the Royal Television Society. 

Trevor is a non-executive director of the AIM-listed behavioural science consultancy Mind Gym; he was the President of the John Lewis Partnership Council until 2018, and founding chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.