Patrick Keiller

Patrick Keiller was born in Blackpool, Lancashire (1950), and moved to London in 1967 to study architecture at UCL’s Bartlett school. In 1974, he started teaching, while working as an architect.  In 1979, he began a two-year MA in the Department of Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art. Between 1983 and 2000 he was a part-time lecturer in fine art at Middlesex Polytechnic, later University, after which he was a research associate in visual culture until 2002. In 1991, his proposal for a feature-length film London (1994) was accepted by the British Film Institute. It was followed by Robinson in Space (1997), for BBC Films and the BFI, adapted as a book published in 1999, and a feature-length television documentary for Channel Four The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000), not so far broadcast. Between 2002 and 2011 Keiller was a research fellow at the Royal College of Art in London during which he produced a feature-length film Robinson in Ruins (2010), first exhibited in that year’s Venice Film Festival, and later the basis for The Robinson Institute, an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2012 accompanied by a book The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet. In 1986, Keiller undertook a British Council Academic Exchange visit to Czechoslovakia. In 1995, he began a DAAD Residency in the Berliner Künstlerprogramm. In 2004, he received an honourable mention and medal in the Erich Schelling Architecture Theory Award. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Open University (2011-14) and was the 2017-18 Sir Arthur Marshall Visiting Professor of Urban Design at the University of Cambridge.