Dr El Morgan is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art. She uses video, printmaking, drawing and sculpture to examine materials and processes of making across species. This has included making a diamond from the dead creatures of the River Thames, serenading a spider and rubbing fish. In 2024 she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Visual Art in recognition of her work.
El’s work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally with venues such as the Serpentine Gallery, Raven Row gallery and the Venice Architecture Biennale. Her book ‘’ examines the history of the human uses of spider silk, from royal underwear in Europe to sticky silk tunics in the South Pacific. See the and a .
El carried out her doctoral studies at the Slade School of Fine Art and the UCL Department of Anthropology. She has been awarded funding from the AHRC, The Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.
What happens when one making animal meets another? El’s work focuses on making across species – how what we make intersects with what other animals are making. She is currently researching animals that eat art, from carpet beetles in museum storage rooms to squirrels in data centres, funded by the Philip Leverhulme prize in Visual Art. She leads the Stickiness Research Group, bringing together researchers from the sciences and humanities across five UK universities with a shared interest in organic and cultural stickiness. Her recent solo exhibition, Tale of the Frozen Bits, at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester explored the human and nonhuman animals involved in IVF, including hamsters and frogs, and the gallons of urine donated by Italian nuns in the 1950s, in response to an order from the Vatican.
Keywords: animal studies, material culture, interdisciplinary research, practice-led research.
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El is on her Leverhulme prize period until January 2029, and is not taking on any new doctoral students.
Current PhD supervision
- Ania Mokrzycka
Completed PhD supervision:
- Lucia Cunningham (supervised with Deborah Harty)
- Peter Dukes (supervised with Ahren Warner)
- James Bowen (supervised with Deborah Harty and Johanna Hallsten)
- Zoe Petersen (supervised with Gill Whiteley and Johanna Hallsten)
- Assunta Ruocco (supervised with Gill Whiteley)