Tom Overton
Tom Overton is a writer and and Archive Curator/Postdoctoral Fellow at the Barbican Centre, London. As part of an AHRC-Funded PhD between the British Library and the Centre for Life-writing Research, King's College London, he catalogued the archive of the writer and artist John Berger (1926-2017), and curated a conference, free school and exhibition at Somerset House, London, to mark the 40th Anniversary of Berger's collaborative TV series and book Ways of Seeing (1972) and Booker-winning novel G.
After editing two acclaimed, internationally translations of Berger's writing on art for Verso Books (Portraits: John Berger on Artists (2015) and Landscapes: John Berger on Art (2016), he is currently working on a major Berger biography for Penguin Press/Allen Lane Books. He has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4, been a Fellow of the Harry Ransom Center and Henry Moore Institute, was a host of Suite (212) on Resonance 104.4FM and has written for frieze, The Guardian, The White Review, Brick and the London Review of Books and Paris Review Blog.
Practice
I am a writer, critic, and archive curator whose main current focuses are on the biography of John Berger and the archives of the Barbican Centre and Estate. These refract out into formal interests in the natures, meanings and uses of archives and auto/biography, and broader interests in terms of content: the relationships between art, photography, film, television, architecture and literature, twentieth century and particularly postwar cultural history, art centres and curatorial practices.