Professor Jo Applin FBA

Summary

Jo Applin is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she is Director of the Centre for the Art of the Americas. Jo’s research interests centre on modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on 1960s America and Britain, and with a focus on sculpture, abstraction, feminism, gender and ageing, as well as the intersections of art and theory. 

After attending state schools in Essex, Jo studied at the University of Essex and UCL, where she was also Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2012 she was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She has been visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre For Architecture, the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, the Terra Foundation Summer Residency, Giverny, and Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is an Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and an editor of 'Oxford Art Journal.'

Jo is the author of several books, including 'Lee Lozano: Not Working' (Yale, 2018), which was awarded the Suzanne and James Mellor Book Prize from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Previous books include 'Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America' (Yale, 2012), 'Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field' (Afterall, 2012), 'Alison Wilding' (Lund Humphries, 2018), and the co-edited 'London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks', 1960-1980 (Penn State, 2018). In 2016 Jo co-curated Flesh, a major loan exhibition of over eighty works at York Art Gallery, and in 2025 'Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois: Eva Hesse, Alice Adams, and Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s', both at The Courtauld Gallery. 

Jo has also published widely on contemporary art and is an active critic, writing regularly for 'Artforum, ArtReview, Times Literary Supplement', and the 'London Review of Books'.