Frances Borzello

Frances Borzello is a British art historian and scholar, feminist art critic and author. Her work specializes in the social history of art, including the social position of European woman artists in the context of their society and the study of female self-portraits and female nudes. She authored the book Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self Portraits, which has been in print since 1998 and has 30 editions. Her work is widely recognized as a contribution to the fields of art history and women's studies.

Biography Borzello earned her PhD from the University College London in 1980. Her dissertation was published in 1981 and was titled, "The relationship of fine art and the poor in late nineteenth century England". Borzello was a member of a women's photography group founded in the 1970s called Second Sight, which included members such as Annette Kuhn, Jill Pack, and Cassandra Wedd.

Borzello's writing, "Preaching to the converted? Feminist art publishing in the 1980s", was included in the 1995 book New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies.

Her 1998 book, Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self Portraits, discusses women creating their own images and the power of self-portraits as opposed to being portrayed as objects, as well as a historical look at gender, identity, and representation. The book is an in-depth look at history, starting with the self-portraits of Medieval nuns and eventually ending in the 21st century. The book examines themes in self-portraits, including motherhood, female beauty, and musical talents, as seen in early work, and themes of sexuality, pain, race, gender, and disease, as seen in the 20th-century.

The 2010 book, Frida Kahlo: Face to Face was co-authored with American artist Judy Chicago and focuses on Frida Kahlo's career as well as Kahlo's artwork in relation to topics like female self-portraiture and commercialization.