Giulia Smith
Dr Giulia Smith is a Senior Tutor at the Ruskin School of Art and a freelance curator and researcher. Previously she was a Mid-Career Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (2024–25) and a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow (Ruskin School of Art, 2019–2023), following postdoctoral fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (2018–2019) and the Getty Research Institute (2016–2017). Her research has also been supported by the Henry Moore Foundation (Research Grant, 2023). She received her PhD from the History of Art Department at UCL in 2016.
Dr Smith specialises in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on the diasporic cultures of postwar Britain and the legacies of empire in Britain and across the Atlantic. She is currently working on a major publication with the estate of Paula Rego and co-curating an exhibition on Paula Rego and Francisco Goya at the Hispanic Society in New York. She is the co-editor with Kate Keohane and Daniella Rose King of Caribbean Eco-Aesthetics: Strategies for Survival Through Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2026) and is finalising a book titled Living Landscapes: Art, Environment and Decolonization from Guyana to the World. Publications relating to this research include ‘Cosmic Hinterland: Aubrey Williams’s Ecological Vision’, in Aubrey Williams: Art, Histories, Futures (PMC/Yale University Press, 2024), a book that won the HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Contemporary Period.
Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues including Antonius Roberts: Art, Ecology and Sacred Space (National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, 2023); Life Between Islands: Caribbean British Art 1950s–Now (Tate Publishing, 2021); Paula Rego (Tate Publishing, 2021); and in peer-reviewed journals such as British Art Studies, Third Text, Sculpture Journal, Art History and Art Monthly. In the past, she has published articles on a range of subjects centring on experiences of movement and diaspora, from the representation of interracial love in the aftermath of Windrush (‘Decolonising Love: Frank Bowling in the Early 1960s’, Third Text, 2021), to the remaking of identities in the postwar London art world (‘Paula Rego: Gutsy Painting’, Tate Publishing, 2021; ‘Painting that Grows Back: Magda Cordell, 1956–1961', British Art Studies 1, 2015).
Dr Smith has worked on exhibitions and research programmes with South London Gallery, ICA, Showroom, Wellcome Collection, The Drawing Center and the Guggenheim Museum.
