Tom Palin is a painter, writer and teacher, born in Birkenhead. He studied Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, before completing a PhD in Painting at the Royal College of Art (the last PhD in Painting to be awarded by the institution). His writing focuses on the material and pictorial conditions of painting, addressing questions of surface, temporality, staging, configuration and spectatorship, drawing on Romantic, formalist and phenomenological traditions. He has exhibited widely and received awards including the Royal Academy British Institution Award, the Gilchrist-Fisher Award and the Hunting Art Prize Young Artist of the Year Award. For nearly three decades, he has worked across a range of arts education contexts, teaching painting at the Royal College of Art since 2022.
