Katy Hessel

Katy Hessel is a British art historian, broadcaster and curator. She runs @thegreatwomenartists, an Instagram account that has celebrated women artists on a daily basis since October 2015. She hosts and writes The Great Women Artists Podcast, where she has interviewed guests from Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid to writers Ali Smith and Deborah Levy. British Vogue and the Evening Standard listed it among their best podcasts. She is also the host of the podcast Dior Talks – Feminist Art, which includes interviews with artists such as Tracey Emin and Judy Chicago. 

Katy has written extensively on the subject of women artists, for British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, curated exhibitions at Victoria Miro Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Kasmin Gallery, and more, and runs the annual The Great Women Artists Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia. She once took over a floor of Tate Modern for a Tate Late. She has lectured at the National Gallery and Cambridge University, fronted films for the Tate, Barbican and Royal Academy of Arts, as well as writing and presenting arts documentaries for the BBC. 

In 2021, she was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Art & Culture, and, since 2022, she has held the position as the curatorial trustee of Charleston, the modernist former home and studio of the Bloomsbury Group. Writing and speaking about art history in an accessible and fun manner, her goal is to readdress the gender imbalance in the art world by reinserting women back into the canon of art history. The Story of Art Without Men is her first book.