Curating
Leyden Gallery
Co-founding and directing a London gallery with a focus on contemporary art, dialogue, and exhibitions such as the SHE SHOWS series.
London-based curator, writer, actor
Adriana Cerne
Art, feminism, psychoanalysis, performance, and the charged textures of everyday life.
Adriana Cerne is a curator, art professional, actor, and writer whose work moves between exhibitions, research, performance, and poetic language. She is known for co-founding Leyden Gallery and for developing a practice shaped by feminist thought, maternal inquiry, and psychologically rich forms of attention.
About
Biography
Adriana Cerne is based in London. Her career brings together curating, academic research, writing, and acting, with a sustained interest in the ways art can hold intimacy, memory, female subjectivity, and the domestic everyday.
She co-founded Leyden Gallery in 2013 and has helped shape its distinct artpreneurial approach, curating exhibitions and events that connect rigorous ideas with public encounter. Alongside this, she has worked as a professional actor, often drawn to psychologically complex female roles.
Her academic background includes first-class study in English Literature and Art & Design History, an MA with Distinction in Feminist Visual Culture and Theory, and AHRC-supported doctoral research. Across all these fields, her work returns to feminism, psychoanalysis, language, and visual culture.
Practice
A body of work across disciplines
Acting
Performance
A professional acting practice centred on women with emotional depth, ambiguity, intelligence, and inner life.
Research
Feminist Visual Culture
Long-form research into motherhood, cinema, language, the image, and the psychic textures of domestic experience.
Teaching
Critical Studies
Former lecturing roles at the University of the Arts London and the Royal College of Art, bridging theory, writing, and creative practice.
Selected work
Writing, research, curation
Publications & research
- Writing in Tongues: Chantal Akerman’s News From Home
- Maternal Matters — research on feminist cinema, domesticity, and maternal experience
- Critical writing shaped by psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and the visual culture of the everyday
Curation
- Co-founder and curator of Leyden Gallery
- Development of artist-led and conceptually driven public programming
- Curated and reviewed a retrospective screening of filmmaker Sarah Pucill’s work
Acting
- Professional actor and Equity UK member
- Screen work that sits alongside a wider artistic and literary practice
- Available space here for selected credits, stills, reel links, or upcoming roles
Current work
Somatic writing, fragments, and the overlooked
Adriana’s current work moves further into a deeply personal and embodied terrain. It explores how the body metabolises the everyday, transforming domestic fragments, memory, aging, erotic charge, and overlooked sensations into language.
This includes an ongoing hybrid memoir in fragments and the development of perambutext: walking text-poems shaped by motion, rhythm, and attention. Here, writing becomes not only reflection, but a physical practice of thought.
Key threads
Approach
One practice, many forms
Curating, acting, research, and writing are not separate paths here. They form a single continuum: a practice attentive to voice, image, embodiment, and the subtle intensities of lived experience.
Contact
For curatorial, writing, academic, or performance enquiries
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Leyden Gallery
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