Institute of Museums, Heritage and Society --- Curators in Conversation Dr Melissa Gustin, National Museums Liverpool

Please join us for a talk in the ‘Curators in Conversation' series on Monday 31 March at 4.30pm in School 2. This will be followed by a reception in the School of Art History 79 North Street.

Dr Melissa L Gustin is Curator of British Art at National Museums Liverpool, based at the Walker Art Gallery. She completed her PhD in History of Art at the University of York in 2018, focusing on nineteenth-century American women sculptors in Rome. Before beginning her PhD, she was an exhibition research associate in Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has since taught at the Universities of York and Essex and held fellowships at the Henry Moore Institute and the Watts Gallery—Artists Village. She has published research on nineteenth-century and contemporary sculpture and painting in The Burlington Magazine, British Art Studies, Art History, and exhibition catalogues in the USA. Her wider research interests include the relationships between past and present in art practices, particularly the uses and reuses of classical forms, temporality, gender, and new technologies in sculpture practice. Her in-progress monograph on G F Watts, Victorian painter-sculptor, focuses on Watts's use of art history as a carrier of meaning throughout his career. At National Museums Liverpool, she has co-curated exhibitions on women landscape artists and women and non-binary artists looking at women, as well as curating a forthcoming exhibition for the 250th anniversary of JMW Turner's birth, Turner: Always Contemporary (25 October 2025- 22 February 2026).