Suzette Field was born in 1978 in Los Angeles. In 1996 she moved to England and rented a derelict 3,000 square foot warehouse on Kingsland Road in Shoreditch which she converted into a cinema with pre-war sofas for seating. In 1998 she bought a five-storey disused Georgian property on Shoreditch High Street at a pre-Hoxton boom price and restored it to its former glory with a 25 seat cinema on the ground floor. The renovated building, Time for Tea, received wide coverage in the style press, including a 10 page spread in The World of Interiors.
Her career as an impresario began in 2000 as a founder of The Modern Times Club, a legendary retro night which Tatler dubbed "the Rolls Royce of cabaret" and launched acts such as the Puppini Sisters and Paloma Faith. In 2007 she brought her expertise to the nascent Last Tuesday Society, a 'pataphysical organisation devoted to "exploring and furthering the esoteric, literary and artistic aspects of life in London and beyond", and helped expand it from organising tea parties and lectures to being one of London's premier promoters. Their events, which range from masquerades to crying parties to seances and nights of jazz age decadence, now attract audiences of up to three thousand revellers.
In 2009 The Last Tuesday Society opened its first permanent home: a shop, art gallery and museum on Mare Street in Hackney. Designed in the style of a 17th century Wunderkabinett, the shop sells a wide variety of curiosities including 19th century shrunken heads, taxidermy, narwhal tusks, carnivorous plants and articulated skeletons. This eclectic collection has attracted a long list of celebrity clients. In 2010 Jane Goldman (Mrs Jonathan Ross) bought a two-headed foetal skeleton from the shop, which achieved nationwide press coverage (and featured as a question on Have I Got News For You).
In 2010 Suzette curated the opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Renaissance Galleries with a grand masked ball for 12,000 people. In 2012 her first book - A Curious Invitation: The Forty Greatest Parties in Literature - was published by Picador in the UK and Harper Perennial in the US.
Suzette also organises talks on a wide range of cultural and literary topics at National Trust properties throughout London. In May 2014 she (with Stephen Coates) will be taking over the London Eye and curating a lecture on a different inspirational Londoner in each of its thirty-two pods. Her ever sold-out mouse taxidermy workshops will be coming to Black’s Club in Soho and Steam and Rye in the City in early 2014 and she will be opening a pop-up shop in Box Park, Shoreditch.
Suzette Field is also a graphic designer and web artist and is the creator of her company’s online identity and esoteric party invitations. She lives in North London and has two daughters.
