Eric Langham
About the Speaker
Eric is a cultural thinker and curator who reimagines how we understand and experience the world through museums and storytelling. He is known for redefining the dynamic between narrative, space, and audience to create meaningful, future-focused experiences that celebrate inclusivity, imagination, and impact. He is recognised globally as a planner of new museums and cultural projects.
As a Founder of Barker Langham and Barker Langham Future, a not-for-profit foundation established in 2025, Eric is dedicated to shaping a cultural sector that connects diverse voices and generates new ways of understanding the world.
Prior to Barker Langham, he was Head of Exhibitions and Collections at the Commonwealth Institute and Senior Curator at the National Justice Museum.
Attending
MENTORING SESSION Professional Development for Museum Workers (For Grantees)
Speaker's Sessions (1)
Date
Session
Mentoring Session
MENTORING SESSION Professional Development for Museum Workers (For Grantees)
ERIC LANGHAM & DARREN BARKER
Title: Regenerative Futures Lab
Museums today are reimagining their purpose, not only as custodians of culture, but as
catalysts for renewal and transformation. The rise of regenerative museums signals a shift
toward institutions that seed new economies, nurture creativity, renew communities, restore
ecologies, and draw on ancestral wisdom to shape flourishing futures.
This mentoring session explores how museums can move beyond interpretation to production,
becoming engines of imagination, economic resilience, and environmental repair. Participants
will reflect on their own career pathways as regenerative acts: creating value, cultivating
ecosystems of support, and shaping positive change. Through activities such as rapid reflection,
creative mapping, and a personal ‘Future Card’, attendees will leave with clarity, confidence,
and a clear direction for impact, proving that museum careers can regenerate people, places,
and possibilities.
MAYA ALLISON
Title: Curating for Future Museums in a Global Context
In 2017, on the eve of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s opening, an arts journalist asked Maya Allison:
“Is Abu Dhabi’s art scene thriving? What is most exciting about it? And how will the Louvre Abu
Dhabi affect the art world there?”
In this mentoring session, she revisits those questions through the lens of lived experience and
evolving practice. Drawing from her relocation from the US to the UAE, she reflects on how new
intersections of audiences and ideas have informed curating and museum-making in the region.
The discussion explores how museums in the UAE have become spaces for imagining
collective futures.
YAZID ANANI
Title: A Tetrad on Museums and Learning
This session explores the evolving relationship between museums and learning through a series
of interconnected questions. How can inclusion move from being an add-on or gesture to
becoming inherent to museological thinking and practice? How can exhibition-making, through
curation, collection, acquisition, display, and interpretation, be more closely connected with
learning, allowing the two to inform one another while maintaining their respective expertise?
Participants will discuss how museum spaces can be designed to support simultaneous
processes of exhibition-making and learning, creating environments where artists, curators,
educators, and communities collaborate in shared inquiry and reflection.