Jo Gilmour completed a Masters at the University of Sydney in 1997, specialising in Australian women’s history and writing. She worked at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney before joining the exhibitions unit of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, contributing to major exhibition projects at the Museum of Sydney, the Justice & Police Museum and the Hyde Park Barracks Museum. Since 2008, Jo’s been the Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, where she’s become known as a bit of a boffin where the subject of colonial Australia is concerned. Explorers, bushrangers, harlots, mutineers and cannibal convicts are among the topics she’s explored in floortalks and in her writing for Portrait magazine. Her fascination with the Burke and Wills story led to an interest in the prevalence of bushy beards in portraits of chaps from the 1850s and 1860s. Jo’s Mo Show (with beards) is the result.
