Karly Allen

Karly Allen is an art lecturer and museum educator. She worked for the National Gallery for 18 years and has lectured widely for UK collections and cultural organisations including the V&A, National Portrait Gallery, Courtauld Gallery, Wallace Collection, Royal Collection, British Library, Christie’s Education and the Art Fund. She has contributed to the National Gallery podcast and programmes on BBC Radio 2 and Radio 4.

Alongside her gallery teaching, Karly has previously held creative programming roles within major art collections: Education Manager for the Royal Collection and Adult Learning Officer for the National Gallery. She brings this experience and insight to the projects she devises for museums and for Limina Collective.

Karly graduated with a BFA in Drawing from the Ruskin School of Fine Art (University of Oxford), before completing an MA in History of Art at SOAS (University of London). As a drawing practitioner, she uses drawing as a tool for looking and investigating, and encourages gallery audiences to connect with artworks through mark-making.

In recent years, Karly has integrated mindfulness approaches into her museum workshops, and is deepening her practice by gaining a qualification in teaching meditation in the Zen tradition. She is excited by the potential for mindfulness practices to enrich the viewing of art, and help gallery visitors move beyond the barriers to sustained looking that can be experienced in the museum environment and the mind. In 2016 she presented a workshop at the National Gallery symposium ‘Mindfulness and Art’ and in 2018 she teamed up with Clare and Lucia to form Limina Collective.