About

Heather Belnap is Professor of Art History & Curatorial Studies at Brigham Young University. She currently holds a BYU College of Humanities Professorship and was recently awarded BYU’s Phi Kappa Phi Award.

She has presented and published widely in feminist art history, and particularly on women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art and society. Recently, she has turned her attention to the fields of Utah and Mormon studies. Professor Belnap has co-edited two books, Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 (Ashgate, 2011) and Women, Femininity, and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 (Routledge, 2014). She co-authored, with Corry Cropper and Daryl Lee, Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-century France (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Some of her current projects include Modernity’s Muses: Women, Art, and Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris; a volume on Mormon artist Minerva Teichert for the Introductions to Mormon Thought series; and Artistic Frontiers: Women and the Making of the Utah Art Scene, 1880-1940 (with Emily Larsen), as well as editing a special issues on midcentury Utah women artists for the Utah Historical Quarterly (with James Swensen) and Mormon art and race for the Journal of Mormon History (with Nathan Rees).

Professor Belnap teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, modern and contemporary art, women in art, Latter-day Saint art, and European Studies.

Dr. Belnap is actively engaged in professional and civic organizations, particularly those involved in the advancement of women in the visual arts. She was a member of the CAA Committee on Women in the Arts and currently serves as the chair of CAA’s Services to Historians of the Visual Arts Committee. She is the Utah representative for The Feminist Art Project and was recently honored in Jann Haworth’s Utah Women 2020 mural as one of 250 or so women past and present who have shaped the state’s culture.

She can be contacted at heather_belnap@byu.edu or womeninart@gmail.com