Dr Lucy Soutter is an artist, art historian and critic. Her work focuses on questions of value and meaning in contemporary art and photography.
Lucy Soutter joined the Royal College of Art in 2008.
A multi-disciplinary background provides the foundation for Lucy’s teaching and writing. After concentrating in Visual and Environmental Studies and English and American Literature at Harvard College, Lucy went on to receive an MFA in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts. Her 2001 Yale University PhD thesis The Visual Idea examined the uses of photography by first generation conceptual artists.
Based in London since 2000, Lucy taught both practice and theory on the fine art course at Buckinghamshire New University. She was Theory Coordinator for Photography at the London College of Communication from 2004–8.
She has written about contemporary art and photography for publications including Afterimage, Portfolio, Source, Frieze and Art India. Her 2000 essay “Dial ‘P’ for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s” has recently been reprinted in the anthology Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art edited by Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman (Intellect, 2011). Other recent publications include an introduction to Karen Knorr's book Fables (Filigrane, 2008), and an essay on narrative and staging in the work of women photographers in the exhibition catalogue Role Models (Scala, 2008) She is currently working with Routledge Press on a book entitled Why Art Photography? to be published in 2012.