Bryan Sitch

Background

About Bryan Sitch

I have worked for 35 years in museums in northern England, looking after archaeological collections at Leeds Museums (including the Scheduled Ancient Monument of Kirkstall Abbey), Hull Museums, and, over the last 17 years, at Manchester Museum, which is part of the University of Manchester. As Deputy Head of Collections, I help to manage a team of curators of the Humanities and Natural Sciences collections. I’ve worked on a wide range of exhibitions: ‘Lindow Man A Bog Body Mystery’ (2008-9), which won two awards; the ‘Ancient Worlds’ galleries redevelopment (opened October 2012); ‘Fragmentary Ancestors’ (Oct 2013-April 2014), ‘Whitworth Park’ (May-Oct 2014); ‘Making Monuments on Rapa Nui; the Stone Statues of Easter Island’ (April to Sept 2015), ‘Rediscovering Neanderthals’ (April to July 2016) and ‘Nature Through Roman Eyes’ (April-Nov 2018) and ‘A Ming Emperor’s Garden Seat’ (2020). The Fragmentary Ancestors exhibition showcased for the very first time in the UK terracotta figurines found during fieldwork in Ghana. I am increasingly interested in World Archaeology. I have worked with a wide range of collections, including prehistoric, ancient Greek and Roman, medieval and most recently Chinese. I collected a refugee’s life jacket from the Greek island of Lesvos in 2016 for the museum’s thematic collecting project, which featured as a case study in Sir David Cannadine’s ‘Why Collect?’ report (2018).The Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery (which I helped to lead) opened to the public on 18th February 2023. Building relationships with museums in China is very important and I am learning Mandarin. I visited China in 2018 and 2019 when I was a Headley Trust Fellow.