Julia Cassim
Programme Leader, Challenge Workshops

Julia Cassim is a Research Fellow in the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the RCA. She is an expert on working with 'extreme' users as a route to innovation.

Her career as a writer, designer and researcher has focused on making museum collections of art and artefacts cognitively and physically accessible to people with sensory or learning disabilities.

Julia studied Fine Art and Art History, first at Manchester College of Art and Design and then at Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music where she received a postgraduate sculpture scholarship.

Much of her career has been spent in Japan since the early 1970s. She worked as arts columnist of The Japan Times, and founded a non-profit organisation for visually impaired people to access museum collections. She also curated and designed award-winning exhibitions for audiences with visual impairments and learning disabilities. Into the Light - Museums and their Visually Impaired Visitors, her book published in Japan, draws on this experience.

Returning to the UK in 1998, Julia joined the Helen Hamlyn Centre the following year. She was awarded an MPhil from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2002 for a study building on her work in Japan.