Responsible for: Working with collections from Oceania and the Americas, particularly South and Central America.

Research interests: Research interests: Spiritual and shamanistic imagery in Peruvian archaeological textiles and ceramics; contemporary non-European art; and museological collaborations with indigenous communities.

Victoria (Tori) Adams is the Assistant Curator responsible for working with collections from Oceania and the Americas, particularly South and Central America.

Tori has been a key team member for several exhibitions including Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania (2023); The Tomb: Ancient Egyptian Burial (2017); and in the Science and Technology department, Photography: A Victorian Sensation (2015). She helped with the major redisplay of the Ancient Egypt gallery which opened in 2019.

She has written several blogs and collections stories, and with Frederike Voigt published a chapter on a ‘Collecting Scottish-Yemeni History’.

Victoria’s academic background is in Art History and Literature from the University of York, and a multi-disciplinary MA in Medieval Studies passed with distinction. She specialised in representations of humans and animals inhabiting the margins of European medieval art and society, specifically hirsute eremitic saints and wild people.

She continues to be interested in the representation of sacred and mythological beings across a range of media, and is currently researching into the spiritual and shamanistic imagery of Peruvian archaeological textiles and ceramics.
Victoria was fully funded by the AHRC for the MA in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, where she focused on issues of identity and ownership in displays of Indian art. Subsequently she worked at various regional and national museums, including as Assistant Curator of world cultures collections at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, and the Royal Armouries.

In 2019 Victoria was awarded a Conference Travel Fellowship to attend the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) & AAMC Foundation 2019 conference in New York City. Subsequently she successfully gained follow-up funding to meet curatorial colleagues in museological institutions in Toronto and Ottawa, to discuss collaboration with indigenous communities in interpretation and display. You can read more about it in this blog post.

More recently Tori has focussed on improving the storage and accessibility of the South and Central American collections, arranging photography and improving collections knowledge with advice from visiting specialists.