Dr Moran Sheleg

Moran Sheleg is an art historian and writer specialising in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on the historical discourse surrounding abstract painting (and abstraction more widely) since the 1960s. Her PhD thesis, completed at UCL in 2017, offered a critical study of the troubled status of painting and presented an alternative trajectory for its fate via the work of Ad Reinhardt. She is currently writing a book, developed from this research, which reconsiders Reinhardt’s relationship with art history as both a discipline and a concept.

Moran is also interested in questions of autobiography and gender, and the ways in which they intersect with abstraction in unlikely, divergent, and often conflicting ways. In 2018, she won a Paul Mellon postdoctoral fellowship for her research on the artist Bridget Riley, which has informed several ongoing projects, and has also published on the paintings of Patrick Caulfield, Amy Sillman, and Eva Hesse, and the art criticism of John Ruskin. She is currently editing a collected volume that examines autobiography and the diaristic mode in contemporary art. Her writing has appeared in academic journals including Oxford Art Journal, Journal of Contemporary Painting, The Burlington Magazine, and Object, as well as Tate Research Online.

Before joining the Courtauld, Moran was a visiting lecturer at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford and has also taught at UCL.