Anatomical Head Study #2 (Le Cere Anatomiche della Specola) (1998) Painting by Wilf Tilley

Wilf Tilley (Prof. Michael Miller) was born in the North of England and began his career as an actor, age 16, with the National Youth Theater at The Old Vic. in a production of Antony and Cleopatra, in which Helen Mirren played Cleopatra and he carried a spear.  “Wilf Tilley” (a combination of parental names) was part-adopted for a first solo exhibition at the AIR Gallery, London, when he was 27. He studied English and European Literature with Italian before a postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Art, and co-organized fundraising exhibitions for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-apartheid movement: the latter at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. An interest in the neuro-anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci led, via the Open University, to research on neuronal modelling in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics in the University of Oxford. He was a Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and after a two-year Fellowship in the International Center for Medical Research, Kobe, was a founder member, then senior adviser at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. While at the institute he designed and supervised installation of a brain science exploratorium: "BrainBox". Wilf has held eight solo exhibitions, participated in group exhibitions internationally, and held a first retrospective in Japan, “The Neuro-mytheologian And Other Works", in 2003.  A second retrospective was held at the Frederick Harris Gallery, Tokyo in 2017. And a recent portrait, "Manami-san (2023)", was chosen for the New Light Art Prize Exhibition in the UK, and toured five galleries nationally (2023-2024). As the co-author of several neurological case studies, Wilf addressed a conference in Japan in 2017 on mental time as a neuroscientific phenomenon, using the techniques of classical rhetoric – as described in the Ad Herrenium – to elucidate episodic memory. He is now working on a series, A story in silico, connected with personal memory, nostalgia and fabulation, and recently published two short stories about the art world in the Ekphrastic Review (2022 and 2023).

• Nationality: JAPAN
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Japanese Artists