Rebecca Fortnum (b. 1963) read English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before gaining an MFA from Newcastle University and taking up a fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, USA. She has been a Visiting Fellow in Painting at Plymouth University and at Winchester School of Art; a visiting artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; a Senior Lecturer at Norwich School of Art and Wimbledon School of Art and an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University and Central St Martins School of Art. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts, London and Research Fellow at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University. She has received several awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; the British Council; the Arts Council of England; the British School in Rome and the Art and Humanities Research Council. She has exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Spacex Gallery, Exeter; The Winchester Gallery; Kapil Jariwala Gallery, London; Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham; The Drawing Gallery, London; and Gallery 33, Berlin. She has exhibited in group shows in New York, Maine, Budapest, Salzburg, Marseilles and Gdansk as well as numerous UK exhibitions. Recent group shows include Fluent; painting and words (2002) and Unframed; the politics and practices of women’s contemporary painting (2004). She was instrumental in founding the artist-run spaces Cubitt Gallery and Gasworks Gallery in London and has worked as curator and an art writer, contributing to various magazines and books. Her book, Contemporary British Women Artists, in their own words, has just been published. She is currently a recipient of the Art House's Space for 10 award for mid-career artists (supported by the Esmee Fairbarn Foundation) and a lead international artist (with Alfredo Jaar) for the TRADE project in Ireland.