Judges announced for ROKBOX Grant

Former Director of the Arts Council Collection and respected art writer and editor join the judging panel for the first annual ROKBOX Grant

ROKBOX is thrilled to announce Deborah Smith and Aimee Dawson as judges for the upcoming sustainable packaging ROKBOX Grant. 

The judges will select three UK museums or non-profit arts organisations to receive a reusable fine art shipping crate, designed to reduce the carbon footprint of fine art shipments by over 90% whilst minimising packaging waste. Read more

Meet the judges

Deborah Smith is a curator and consultant who explores innovative strategies for collaboration and the presentation of interdisciplinary practices. She has delivered exhibitions and large-scale commissions, often interwoven with programmes of learning, engagement, and interpretation. Her previous roles include former Director of the Arts Council Collection—the most widely circulated national collection of modern and contemporary British art, Interim Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Galleries, and Associate Curator at Arup, the global engineering and design company. Recent projects include VR exhibition Excavation: Macro to the Micro (vortic.art). She is a judge for the Museum + Heritage Awards (2024–), serves on the Shadow Board of The Box, Plymouth, is a member of the University of Warwick Art Collection Committee and the UK Parliament Collections Advisory Group, and sits on the HS2 Independent Design Panel.

Aimee Dawson is a freelance art writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in Apollo Magazine, Artnet, Artsy, V&A Magazine and Cultured Magazine, among others, and she was a contributing writer to the book African Artists (Phaidon, 2022). She is a columnist at The Art Newspaper, where she was formerly an editor, and is also a Guest Lecturer in the School of Arts at SOAS, University of London.

Grant applications are open now and close on 10th September. Apply here

Enquiries: info@rok-box.com