Biography
Dr Tanya Harrod is an independent design historian, living in London, who writes widely on craft, art and design. Harrod contributes regularly to The Burlington Magazine, The Guardian, Crafts, Prospect and The Literary Review. With Glenn Adamson and Edward S. Cooke she is the co-founder and co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, of the London-based Critic’s Circle and of the Art Workers Guild. Harrod is on the Advisory Panel of The Burlington Magazine and is Advisor to the Craft Lives Project based at the National Sound Archive of the British Library as well as on the Contemporary Art Society's Omega Fund Advisory Committee for craft.
Her major study, The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century, was published in 1999. The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, modern pots, colonialism and the counterculture was published in 2012; for which she was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for biography. Her most recent books are The Real Thing: essays on making in the modern world (2015), Leonard Rosoman (Royal Academy, 2016), Craft, Whitechapel Gallery 2018 (part of the series Documents of Contemporary Art) and Humankind: Ruskin Spear, class, culture and art in 20th century Britain, (2022). She currently working on a double life of Rolf and Margaret Gardiner.