Joseph Morgan Schofield


JMS is a curator, artist and creative producer. At the heart of these entangled practices is an understanding of performance art as a potent, contemporary modality of ritual. He / they draws on queer, ecological and esoteric thought to engage with the lost, the unseen, the forgotten. He understands his performances  and films  as thin places, as ceremony, as a way of practicing sensitivity, of reorienting attention and touching the more raw edges of experience.

As a curator, they activate spaces for collective encounter through Future Ritual, cultivating intergenerational exchange and artist-led research, experimentation and creation. Future Ritual is a long term curatorial, research and organising practice initiated in 2017.  

Since 2024, Joseph has worked as Curator, Public Practice at Tate. Previous roles have included those at Live Art Development Agency, The Place and ]performance s p a c e[. JMS is also co-founder and co-director of VSSL studio.

Across all this work, Joseph remains committed to the live and embodied practices which welcome complexity, senstivity, tension and difficulty, and which call towards the more raw edges of experience.

Joseph lives in London (UK) but most often works in dialogue with the wet, windy Pennine moors and Cumbrian fells of the English North West.





joseph@futureritual.co.uk
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Future Ritual


Joseph’s research interests into belief, mystery, land and death are most clearly expressed through Future Ritual, a long term curatorial, research and organising practice initiated in 2017. Formalised in 2023 as a community interest company, Future Ritual continues to hold Joseph’s independent curatorial and artistic research alongside artist development and participatory projects and important collaborative relationships, such as those with Anne Bean, emilyn claid, Marilyn Arsem, Martin O’Brien and VestAndPage. 

Future Ritual’s most recent project was CEREMONY, a year-long programme cycle exploring performance as a mode of gathering amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life. Other significant projects have included ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, a weekend of artistic pilgrimage and spiritual seeking convened with Anne Bean for Norfolk and Norwich Festival (2023), and ‘An Eternity of Nothingness’, a year-long research and creation process exploring immortality with Martin O’Brien at the Whitechapel Gallery (2023).

> Future Ritual








practices:  curation / film / performance / writing
contexts:  Future Ritual / Tate  /  VSSL studio / ]ps[
years:  2016 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21  /  22  /  23  /  24  / 25  /