Overview
Kai Syng Tan PhD FRSA PFHEA (she/they) is an award-winning creative arts and humanities academic-artist-agitator, and sought-after keynote-speaker, mentor and thought leader. Since August 2026, they are Professor of Love-Led Leadership with the Arts, Culture, Creativity and Neurodiversity. 'Love' is motif, method, metaphor and material in their work, as a co-creative process of change- and futures-making, solidarity, transformation and hope.
Hyper-active and tentacular, Kai seeks to embody ‘artful leadership’ in their actions and approaches including as Programme Leader for MA Arts and Cultural Leadership, Winchester School of Art, and research (including via three books as author/co-editor to re-claim and re-imagine ‘leadership' through the prisms of neuro-queering, anti-oppression, futurity and creativity).
Leadership, management and engagement
Kai is known for curating, colliding and connecting diverse and divergent bodies and bodies of knowledges/cultures/disciplines, in/between/beyond Higher Education, civic, cultural, creative, technological and non-profit organisations, to catalyse new insights and dialogues and actions for a more equitable and creative future. They work in/across areas including:
- futures
- leadership and innovation
- social change, neurodiversity
- equity diversity and inclusion (EDI)
- (mental) health
- art-science entanglements
- mobilities and borders
- tech for good
Their 900 innovative interventions across the years (BBC, Biennale of Sydney, Tokyo Designers Week, Frontiers in Psychology, MOMA New York, Royal Geographical Society) are distinct for ‘positive atmosphere’ (Guardian), ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ (geographer Alan Latham) and ‘eclectic style & cheeky attitude’ (Sydney Morning Herald). Awards include: National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement Award for Culture Change, San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award and Young Artist Award from Singapore President.
Kai is reviewer for UK Research and Innovation and Arts and Humanities Research Council (since 2015), and was expert advisor for Singapore Infocomm Media Authority (2007-2012), UK Parliament Knowledge Exchange unit, Iceland Research Council and more.
Knowledge exchange and enterprise
As Visual and Communications Director for the £4.8m Opening and Closing Ceremonies of Paralympics of Southeast Asia, Kai led disabled creatives in large multimedia shows at Singapore Indoor Stadium & Marina Bay Sands, which were described as ‘spectacular’ by the Singapore Prime Minister & ‘game-changing’ by Association of Deaf.
Lasting impacts include how sign language is now used in the safety videos of the Singapore Airlines. Kai strategised a 4-day festival with 11 partner organisations, the 75th Anniversary of the 5th Pan African Congress Celebrations for Black History Month 2020, reaching 18.2m worldwide. Keynote lectures and masterclasses include European League of Institutes of the Arts’ Teachers Academy (300,000 members in 282 universities) and Oxford University Philosophy-Psychiatry Summer School.
Research
Kai has been labelled ‘absolutely instrumental’ (ANTI Festival of Contemporary Art) in reimagining running as creative discourse through her curated RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale & 90-person Running Cultures network.
Their PhD thesis explored the poetics of running (downloaded >4225 times), and was awarded by the Slade School as a UCL scholar.
They were the first artist-in-residence at the world-leading Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre with art-science commission #MagicCarpet, appearing on an EU-funded film viewed >65,000 times.
Kai is the first artist on British Journal of Psychiatry Bulletin Editorial Board, and was the first UK Adult ADHD Network Creative/Cultural Consultant. They founded and co-chairs the Neurodiversity In/& Creative Research Network of 480 neurodivergent innovators, allies & groups including US, Canada, Australia & Asia.
Education
Kai is an experienced academic developer and leader (Principal Fellowship in Higher Education, PFHEA), Kai has taught in >200 universities (Helsinki, Tama Art University in Tokyo, Silliman in the Philippines, Royal College of Art and Nanyang Technological University) and regularly delivers masterclasses and CPDs (such as for 870 brain and mind experts from 17 countries in Berlin).
Public-facing programmes that they have intiated through MA Arts and Cultural Leadership include Masterclasses Towards Dismantling the Master Story of Leadership (masterclass series featuring atypical thought-leaders and industry movers and shakers), Karama: Expressions of Resistance from Gaza (photovoice project in collaboration with UK and Palestinian community leaders and John Hansard Gallery that was praised as ‘moving’ and ‘fantastic’), and the #WSAsummit If It Don't Exist, Build It: Ctrl+Alt+Reimagine ( student-led public assembly featuring Ghanaian-British artist Larry Achiampong, senior managers from Arts Council England, Whitechapel Gallery and CVAN, alongside student-led Masterclasses).
