About
Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Her new book The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World is published in the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, by Hachette in Australia and Pegasus Books in the USA; her BBC Radio 3 five-part essay on the subject was broadcast in January 2022, and available to listen to here. The Mirror and the Palette: Revolution, Rebellion and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits was published in 2021 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Pegasus Books in the USA. Jennifer is the inaugural editor of the National Gallery of Australia's new publication The Annual and the host of the NGA’s new podcast Artists’s Artists. In July 2023, the exhibition she curated, 'Thin Skin' – a survey of contemporary and historical painting – opened at the Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne. (Read Ocula editor Anna Dickie's interview with Jennifer about the show here.) She is also currently working on various scripts.
Jennifer was frieze magazine reviews editor from 1998-2003; co-editor with Jörg Heiser and then Dan Fox until 2017; frieze editorial director from 2017-19 and editor-at-large until 2021. She is the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history; the author and illustrator of the children’s book There’s Not One; the editor of The Artist’s Joke; author of the novel Bedlam; and the writer of the feature film I Really Hate My Job.
In 2015, Jennifer curated the Hayward Touring and Arts Council Collection exhibition ‘One Day, Something Happens: Pictures of People’, which travelled from 2015-17 to Leeds Art Gallery; Nottingham Castle; Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; The Atkinson, Southport; and Towner Gallery, Eastbourne. She has been a judge of the John Moore’s Painting Prize, the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize and the 2021 Freelands Painting Prize and a member of the advisory boards of Arts Council England, the British Council Venice Biennale Commission and the Contemporary Art Society. She is currently on the Imperial War Museum Art Commissions Committee.
Jennifer has a BA Fine Art (Painting) from the Canberra School of Art, and a MA (Fine Art, Painting) from Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne; her paintings are in various public and private collections in Australia. She travelled to London on a Murdoch Fellowship in 1995 and stayed.
Jennifer’s literary agent is David Godwin of David Godwin Associates and her script agent is Rosie Gurtovoy of Peters Fraser Dunlop.
