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Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Her new book The Mirror and the Palette: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Pegasus Books in the United States. She is currently working on a new book about women, art and the spirit world; her BBC Radio 3 five-part essay on the subject will be broadcast in January. She is also working on various essays and scripts.
Jennifer was frieze magazine reviews editor from 1998-2003; co-editor with Jörg Heiser and then Dan Fox until 2017; frieze Editorial Director from 2017-19 and editor-at-large until 2021. She is the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history; the author and illustrator of the children’s book There’s Not One; the editor of The Artist’s Joke; author of the novel Bedlam; and the writer of the feature film I Really Hate My Job.
In 2015, Jennifer curated the Hayward Touring and Arts Council Collection exhibition ‘One Day, Something Happens: Pictures of People’, which travelled from 2015-17 to Leeds Art Gallery; Nottingham Castle; Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; The Atkinson, Southport; and Towner Gallery, Eastbourne. She has been a judge of the John Moore’s Painting Prize, the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize and the 2021 Freelands Painting Prize and a member of the advisory boards of Arts Council England, the British Council Venice Biennale Commission and the Contemporary Art Society. She is currently on the Imperial War Museum Art Commissions Committee.
Jennifer has a BA Fine Art (Painting) from the Canberra School of Art, and a MA (Fine Art, Painting) from Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne; her paintings are in various public and private collections in Australia. She travelled to London on a Murdoch Fellowship in 1995 and stayed.
