In March 2020 Griselda Pollock, won the Holberg Prize, one of the largest international awards given to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology. She is Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds where she is also Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH), in addition to being a Fellow of the Association of Art History. She has been teaching at the University of Leeds since 1977 and accepted her appointment as Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) in 2001, where she teaches critical approaches to the history of visual arts and film, with a particular focus on women and feminism. Griselda Pollock really started her career as a feminist academic with her article “What’s Wrong with Images of Women?”, examining disparities between male and female imageries in the late 1970s. Her 1981 book, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, co-authored with Rozsika Parker, was a radical critique of the discipline of art history and its canon. It has become a classic text in feminist art history, as has her 1988 book, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art.
Over the years, Griselda Pollock has become one of the UK’s leading cultural theorists, publishing over 20 monographs.
Maria Walsh is a writer and art critic. She is Reader in Artists’ Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts and co-convenes the Subjectivity and Feminisms research group there. Outtakes from her doctoral work on Tacita Dean, Chantal Akerman and phenomenological nomadic subjectivity have been published in peer-reviewed journals including Screen, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, and Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. Book chapters on artists’ film are included in Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (2011) and Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (forthcoming 2018). Her art criticism, including features, artists’ interviews and reviews, appears regularly in Art Monthly. Her book Art and Psychoanalysis was published by I.B Tauris in 2012 and she is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Performative Therapeutics in Contemporary Artists’ Moving Image which investigates the ‘screen’ as a critical site of therapeutic encounter in the context of neoliberal concepts of selfhood – a preliminary version of one chapter was published in 2017 in the peer-reviewed online journal NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies.
Walsh has also edited books and journals, and is Reviews Editor of MIRAJ: Moving Image Review and Art Journal. She has also collaborated with Dr Mo Throp to curate a series of exhibitions on female subjectivity in art practice as well as an ongoing project, ‘The Subjectivity & Feminisms Performance Dinners’, a series of dinner events that involve staff, students, and invited artists in collective feminist research exploring the mutual embeddedness of theory and practice via performative responses to key feminist texts.