About

Heather Belnap is Professor of Art History & Curatorial Studies and Coordinator of Global Women’s Studies 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 Best Book Award. A French translation of this book, titled Mormonopolis: Imaginaire français du mormonisme 1830-1914, will be published by the Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2026. In addition to numerous articles and essays, 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).

Dr. Belnap is currently involved in several projects. She continues to chip away at her book manuscript, Modernity’s Muses: Women, Art, and Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris, and is currently writing for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Vestiaire Dissident: The Masculinization of Women’s Fashion in the 19th Century, which will open at the Palais Galliera, Paris’s fashion museum, in September 2026. She is also working on a volume on Mormon artist Minerva Teichert for the Introductions to Mormon Thought series and a book and exhibition project tentatively titled, Artistic Frontiers: Women and the Making of the Utah Art Scene, 1880-1940 (with Emily Larsen). Thanks to a grant from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and the generosity of the BYU Office of Digital Humanities, her digital public history initiative, the Utah Women Artists Project, is now underway and should launch in early 2026.

Her most recent publications include a guest edited special issue on mid century women in Utah art for the Utah Historical Quarterly (Fall 2023), the book section, “The Mormon-LDS Art Tradition,” in Variations on Christian Art: Mennonite, Mormon, Quaker and Swedenborgian (Bloomsbury, 2024), and an essay on mid-century Mormon women artists for the Latter-Day Saint Art: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 2024), for which she received a special commendation from the Association of Mormon Letters. She co-curated two exhibitions, Materializing Mormonism: Trajectories in Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art (Mesa Arts Center, May 10—August 8, 2024) and the largest survey of LDS art to date, Work and Wonder: Two Centuries of Latter-day Saint Art (Church History Museum, September 26, 2024—March 1, 2025).

Professor Belnap teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, modern and contemporary art, women in art, Latter-day Saint art, European studies, and global women’s studies. She currently holds the BYU College of Humanities Scheuber-Veinz Professorship and held the 2024 Christensen Lectureship for Achievement in Literature or Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Folklore, Art History, or Creative Writing. She also received the student-nominated 2024 BYU European Studies Professor the Year award.

Dr. Belnap is 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 currently serves on the Utah Women and Leadership Project‘s Arts & Music Impact Team. Dr. Belnap was honored in Jann Haworth’s Utah Women 2020 mural as one of 250+ women past and present who have shaped the state’s culture.

In her spare time, Heather watches British crime and Nordic noir shows, throws parties, redecorates her house, does the NYT Spelling Bee religiously, takes urban hikes, buys quirky clothes & shoes, coddles her 6 children, 3 kitties and 2 grandkitties, and reads obsessively. She loves music—but especially the kind you can dance to—and sings in her church choir as well as in the Utah Choral Collective. She is also working toward her certification as a Master of Cheese (yes, it’s a real thing).

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