Dr Helen Gorrill

As DJCAD's Reader in Gender and Visual Culture - Helen is currently in a three-book deal with Bloomsbury Academic Press (London & New York). This follows her first monograph Women Can’t Paint: Gender, the Glass Ceiling and Values in Contemporary Art (2020) and includes: her forthcoming book (in press) Wife, Witch, Whore: Essential Conversations about Gender, Art and Culture (2026); and two other books she is currently working on including Husband, Hellraiser, Hore: Essential Conversations about Gender, Art and Culture; and War Paint: Calling a Ceasefire on Gender Inequality in the Arts.

Helen’s work Women Can’t Paint is held in the permanent research collections of the V&A, the Met (New York), MoMA (NY), Baltic, Tate Britain, the Museums Association, and many other international institutions. Her artwork is included in the Brooklyn Museum’s artabase archive (New York). She has been invited as a keynote speaker nationally and internationally including at Bonhams London, KMSKA the Royal Museum of Art Antwerp (Belgium) and Artium Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Vitoria Gasteiz (Spain).

Helen is DJCAD’s Lead for Open Access Research. As part of her role, she has established online publication of school dissertations, and is establishing new online open access journals. She is also founder and Director of two international indie book publishers, non-profit companies founded from the University of Dundee's Enterprise awards to support disadvantaged students, which has published over 30 books. For this, Helen was a winner of the University’s Enterprise awards and a national Converge finalist.

As module lead for the fine art dissertations, Helen has won three University awards for inclusive teaching practice since 2020. As an academic she applies disruptive techniques to challenge stagnancy in gender equality, feminist methodologies and the visual arts; and applies quantitative and mixed-methods research to painting theory which is expanded through her interest in gender. Within the school, she is module lead for contemporary art practice dissertation/research, and an external PhD examiner.

Helen is included as a lead in Bloomsbury (London & New York) Academic’s Art, Race and Gender collection, whose collection focuses on women artists, artists of colour, art and feminism, masculinity, class, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and related topics. She sits amongst other established scholars including Eddie Chambers, Linda Nochlin and Judith Brodsky: Bloomsbury Visual Arts - About Art Race and Gender.

With a busy and vibrant team of postgraduate research students, Helen welcomes applications from prospective MRes and PhD projects in the areas of visual arts (in)equalities, gender, intersectionality, feminisms (art and theory), gendered aesthetics, and painting theory.