Professor Dorothy Price FBA

Dorothy Price is a specialist in modern and contemporary art and critical race art history and a Fellow of The British Academy. She joined The Courtauld in September 2021 from the University of Bristol, where she was a founder member and the inaugural Director of the Centre for Black Humanities, an interdisciplinary research centre dedicated to researching the histories, art and thought of people of African descent. At Bristol she was also Professorial research lead for the Transnational Modernisms Research Cluster. Her work across modern and contemporary art is informed by her engagement with decoloniality, gender, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, Black studies and critical race art history. From 2018 to 2023 she was Editor of Art History, the journal of the Association for Art History. During her term she produced a series of ground-breaking editorials (‘Whose Art History?’ ‘Art History at the Barricades’ ‘Binding Trauma’) as well as the questionnaire ‘Decolonizing Art History’. Her programme of special issues included ‘Weimar’s Others’, ‘British Art and the Global’ and together with the artist Sonia Boyce OBE RA, ‘Rethinking British Art. Black Artists and Modernism.’ She has published on the work of Frank Bowling, Lubaina Himid, Veronica Ryan, Chantal Joffe, Claudette Johnson, Chila Burman, Matthew Krishanu, Permindar Kaur amongst others, as well as two monographs on modern art in Germany, Representing Berlin in 2003 and After Dada in 2014.

Price also works as a curator. In 2018, together with the painter Chantal Joffe, she curated Personal Feeling is the Main Thing at The Lowry, Salford, a dialogue between Joffe and historic German artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker. In 2020 she worked with Joffe again to curate For Esme with Love and Squalor at Arnolfini, Bristol. In 2022 she worked with the Royal Academy of Arts, London to curate Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and in 2023 she co-curated The Courtauld’s exhibition Claudette Johnson: Presence, the first monographic show of Claudette Johnson’s work at a major public London gallery and for which Johnson was nominated for The Turner Prize. Dorothy’s most recent collaboration was again with the Royal Academy of Arts in 2024 as the lead curator of their ambitious, groundbreaking, prize-winning main galleries exhibition Entangled Pasts 1768-now: art, colonialism and change. The exhibition brought historic works by founder Academicians from the late eighteenth century onwards, (Reynolds, Gainsborough, Copley, West, Evans, Hodges, Turner amongst others) into dialogue with contemporary artists, including Hew Locke, Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare, Shahzia Sikander, Sonia Boyce, Ellen Gallagher, El Antsui, Frank Bowling, John Akomfrah, Sonia Boyce and Lubaina Himid and others. Among its funders were the Ford Foundation and the Terra Foundation of American Art. The exhibition was nominated for the 2024 Apollo Awards for Exhibition of the Year and was awarded the 2024 Eastern Eye Award for Arts.

Price is a widely published author whose work has been supported with funding from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Association for Art History, the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss publication fund, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the AHRC and the Andy Warhol Foundation amongst others. She is represented by Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency and is currently working on several publications, including Framing the Critical Decade: After the Black Arts Movement, The Courage to Look and For Opacity: A Visual Poetics of Contemporary Art. Price currently serves on the Advisory Board of Tate Britain, the Art Committee of the British Academy and the Exhibitions Committee of the Royal Academy of Arts. She also founded the Tate/Paul Mellon Centre’s British Art Network subgroup on Black British Art.