Claire Bishop is an art historian and critic based in London. She is currently Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art. In October she will take up a new job in the History of Art Department at Warwick University. She has also taught at Essex University (where she completed her PhD) and Tate Modern. She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate, 2005), Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (October no.110, 2004) and contributes regularly to Artforum, Flash Art, Untitled, and Tate Etc.

Her latest publication is Participation, an edited anthology of key texts on participation in art from the late 1950s to the present day, and will be published in September by Whitechapel Art Gallery & MIT Press. She recently presented the paperLive Installations and Constructed Situations: The Use of "Real People" in Art, at OCA's Verksted seminar on the Art of Welfare, which is published, along with the other participants' contributions, as a book September 2006.

Her current research interests concern post-medium-specific art, the history of exhibition display, and the politics of spectatorship in socially-engaged and relational art.