Robert Ayers is a British-born artist.
He has enjoyed a successful decades-long life in the arts, and has won a reputation not only as an artist, but as a writer, a teacher, a curator, a producer and promoter, and as an enthusiastic advocate for the contemporary arts and their social relevance.
Though he has made art across the entire range of the visual and performing arts, and now focuses on painting and collage, Robert Ayers is best known as a performance artist. He is recognized as a key figure in the development of performance art in Britain. He has made performances of every imaginable sort and presented them in Britain, the rest of Europe, Australia, and the United States. In 2001 he was inducted as one of the first Honorary Associates of the [British] National Review of Live Art.
Robert Ayers has written on painting, sculpture, performance art, dance, music, technology, and the interdisciplinary arts for The Art Newspaper, art ltd., Art + Auction, Art Monthly, Performance Magazine, Artscribe (where he was a contributing editor), and a range of books, exhibition catalogues, scholarly journals, and websites.
For years his exhibition reviews appeared in every issue of ARTnews, and in 2005 he became New York correspondent for London's Total Theatre magazine. He wrote hundreds of articles, interviews, reviews, and reports for ARTINFO (where he was Senior Editor) and in 2008 he became New York correspondent to EIKON magazine (Vienna).
Robert Ayers works hard to share his passion for the contemporary arts, and he is recognized as a gifted teacher. He has taught in universities, polytechnics, and art colleges throughout Britain, Europe, and the United States. He was Head of the School of Visual and Performing Arts at The Nottingham Trent University in the UK. He was the university's Artistic Director, and installed as Professor of the Contemporary Arts, which was a personal chair created in recognition of his reputation as an artist and academic.