Heather Belnap is Professor of Art History & Curatorial Studies and the newly-appointed Global Women’s Studies Coordinator at Brigham Young University.
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 is the author, with Corry Cropper and Daryl Lee, of Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-century France (University of Illinois Press, 2022), winner of the John Whitmer Historical Association’s 2023 Best Book Award. She 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) and published numerous articles and essays in feminist art history and cultural studies. Her most recent publications include a guest editing a special issue on midcentury women in Utah art for the Utah Historical Quarterly (Fall 2023) and the book section, “The Mormon-LDS Art Tradition,” in Variations on Christian Art: Mennonite, Mormon, Quaker and Swedenborgian, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Some of her current projects include two exhibitions, Work and Wonder: Two Centuries of Latter-day Saint Art (Church History Museum, Fall 2024) and Materializing Mormonism: Trajectories in Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art (Mesa Arts Center, Spring 2024) with (with co-curators Brontë Hebdon and Ashlee Whitaker), a volume on Mormon artist Minerva Teichert for the Introductions to Mormon Thought series; and book and exhibition projects tentatively titled, Artistic Frontiers: Women and the Making of the Utah Art Scene, 1880-1940 (with Emily Larsen). She hopes to complete a book manuscript in her primary field of research, Modernity’s Muses: Women, Art, and Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris, in 2025.
Professor Belnap teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, modern and contemporary art, women in art, Latter-day Saint art, and global women’s studies.
Dr. Belnap is also actively engaged in professional and civic organizations, particularly those involved in the advancement of women in the visual arts. She served as the chair of CAA’s Services to Historians of the Visual Arts Committee (2021-2024) and was a member of the CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (2015-2018). She is the Utah representative for The Feminist Art Project and was 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
HEATHER BELNAP, PH.D. 