Dr Vivien Gaston

Vivien Gaston is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne and art historian and curator. She has been a lecturer in the history and theory of art and design at the University of Melbourne, Monash University and RMIT. She has curated two major survey exhibitions The Naked Face: self-portraits, National Gallery of Victoria (2010-2011) and Controversy: the power of art, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (June-August 2012) and is currently curating Sublime Sea: rapture and reality, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (opening December 2019). She has a special interest in portraits, working closely with the collection in the National Gallery of Victoria as Senior Research Associate for an ARC research grant, 2013-2016, and convening an international conference on portraits in 2016. She has published on subjects ranging from 16^thcentury Italian painting to British and Australian portraits from the 18th to the 21st-centuries,including The Naked Face: self-portraits, NGV (2011) and The Long Portrait Gallery: Renaissance and Baroque Faces (2010), as well as numerous articles for journals including the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.