Dr Lucy Mounfield is Assistant Curator at Ikon, a contemporary art gallery in Birmingham. She was awarded her PhD in History of Art from the University of Nottingham in August 2022. Her thesis provides a recontextualisation of the ideological, spatial and material conditions to which women photographers were subject in the United States and Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s. Further, the thesis challenges the amateur/professional binary that pervades much of the written histories of photography and the approaches to curating the medium. She contends that the centre/periphery dichotomy has been and continues to be drawn along class, gender, racial and spatial lines. This research underpins her curation – non-hierarchical and equitable for all. Her ECG project will focus on collaborative photographic networks and the communication that takes place between groups and individual practitioners both regionally, nationally and internationally as a way to think through curating non-traditional forms of making.
She has also published widely on the history and theory of photography. Her peer-reviewed article – “Little Gems of Color: Kodak, Camera Design as Fashion, and the Gendering of Photography” – was published in the leading photography journal, Transbordeur (2021).
