Welcome to incoming Trustees

Society News

26 October, 2026

We are pleased to announce that three new Trustees have joined the Board:

Dr Alex J Todd and Mohamed Derbal have joined as Teaching and Learning Officers.

Alex is a historian of visual culture. His research is concerned with the ways in which practices of art and design articulate shifting conceptions of political action and subjectivity. Currently, Alex is working on a project that examines the impact of decentralisation and political autonomy on the modalities of socially-engaged practices of art and design in 1980s Europe. Alex completed his Techne-funded PhD at the University of Brighton, where his research focused on the political practice of the Dutch graphic design collective Wild Plakken. He currently teaches in the History of Art and Design department at Pratt Institute in New York. Alex has previously served the DHS as Student Ambassador and Student Representative so we are thrilled to have him join the Board as a full Trustee.

Mohamed is completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Wolfson Scholar in the Humanities and is an incoming Leverhulme-funded postdoctoral researcher at the Architekturmuseum of the Technical University of Munich. He works on the transnational history of German design in the Wilhelmine period. He was previously a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s European Institute. He holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies from Cambridge, an MA in History from the École normale supérieure and a BA in Philosophy from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

We also interviewed Amy Orchard-King who has accepted the new position of Outreach and Engagement Officer.

Amy is a designer, scholar, educator and advocate with an extensive background in the fashion and textiles industry. Committed to surfacing colonial continuities in our current design systems, Amy draws on her ancestral heritage, creative practice, and experiential knowledge to make nice things, contribute to counter-storytelling  and curate equitable, accessible learning environments. Amy is Course Leader of the Diploma in Storytelling at University of the Arts London [UAL], and an Associate Lecturer across fashion and textiles programmes at UAL and Norwich University of the Arts. 

We are very pleased to welcome Alex, Mohamed and Amy to the Board of Trustees and look forward to working with them over the next three years.