Martina Margetts is Senior Tutor in Critical & Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art in London and a leading specialist in applied arts. Her research interests include the meaning of contemporary applied arts, and craft and design in global and social contexts.
Martina Margetts was Editor of Crafts magazine for nine years and a senior member of staff at the Crafts Council. Her books include International Crafts (Thames and Hudson, 1991), Michael Rowe (Lund Humphries, 2003) and Tord Boontje (Rizzoli USA, 2007). She has curated major international touring exhibitions including The Raw and the Cooked: New Work in Clay in Britain (MOMA, Oxford and Barbican, London, 1993; with Alison Britton), Objects of Our Time (Crafts Council, 1996) and Only Human (Crafts Council, 1999). She was a crafts adviser to Arts Council England from 1999 to 2007 and is on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Modern Craft and of Craft Research. She lectures, curates and writes internationally and was a judge and conference speaker at the 2009 International Crafts Biennale in South Korea. In 2010 she undertook her first research visit to Brazil, which resulted in the major conference at the RCA in January 2011 entitled ‘Brazil – The Cultural Contemporary’.