Stephen McNeilly

Stephen McNeilly (born 1968) is a London-based artist and writer whose research-lead practice includes photography, filmmaking, curating and book publishing. He is the Executive Director and Museum Director of the Swedenborg Society, London, and oversees its annual "Swedenborg International Short Film Festival" and "Artist in Residence" programme. In 2010 he curated "Fourteen Interventions", a multi-disciplinary site responsive exhibition at Swedenborg house, which included work by Jeremy Deller, Bridget Smith, Iain Sinclair, Ben Judd and Olivia Plender. In 2016, with Bridget Smith, he co-curated "Now it is Permitted: 24 Wayside Posters", an exhibition of posters designed by Bridget Smith and Fraser Muggeridge which included contributions by Cornelia Parker, Fiona Banner, Marina Warner, Chloe Aridjis, Ali Smith, Michael Landy, Gavin Turk and others.
His long-standing interest in the work of Emanuel Swedenborg informs much of his work and he has published on writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Arthur Cravan. In 2011 he set up the "Swedenborg Archive" imprint, a project which has included contributions from the writers Homero Aridjis, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Ken Worpole, Iain Sinclair and Brian Catling, and the publisher Book Works. As series editor of the "Journal of the Swedenborg Society" he has produced a number of volumes exploring the cultural influence of Swedenborg including "Between Method and Madness", "The Arms of Morpheus", "In Search of the Absolute" and "On the True Philosopher". Notable contributors to the "Journal" include the poet Czeslaw Milosz and the Cambridge linguist John Chadwick. Annalisa Volpone has described the "Journal" as a 'mapping of the impact of Swedenborg's thought on the western literary "imaginaire" from romanticism to contemporary times'.
McNeilly is a founding editor of Dedecus Press, an interdisciplinary and collaborative publishing project, and is the overseeing editor for the "Dedecus Dictionary" and the "Dedecus Picture Archive". Between 2004 and 2012 he was a visiting lecturer in Art, Philosophy and Critical Theory at the University of Creative Arts (Canterbury).