(Elizabeth) Betty Churcher AO (1931–2015), gallery director, author, painter and lecturer, was educated in Brisbane before studying at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1955 she married English artist Roy Churcher and two years later they returned to Brisbane, where they had four sons. Throughout the 1960s Churcher worked as a high school art teacher, and from 1972 to 1975 she was an art critic for The Australian. At the age of 44, when she had been working for some years at the Kelvin Grove College of Advanced Education, Churcher returned to London to study art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She finished up at Kelvin Grove in 1978, and from 1981 to 1987 she taught at the Dean School of Art and Design at the Preston/Phillip Institute of Technology in Melbourne.
In 1987, by which time she had spent three years as the Deputy Chairman of the Australia Council, and four as the Chair of the Visual Arts Board, Churcher was 'headhunted' by Robert Holmes à Court to become director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. She thus became the first female director of an Australian state gallery. After three years in Perth Churcher moved to Canberra to succeed James Mollison as Director of the National Gallery of Australia, heading the institution from 1990 to 1997. Throughout her career, she was a member of many cultural and heritage boards and committees. Churcher won the 1989 Australian Institute of Management Award for Women, and the 1996 Australian Newspaper's Australian of the Year Award. She was an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research at the Australian National University, presented several television series on art including Take Five, Eye to Eye and Proud Possessors, and authored several books including Understanding Art (1974), which won a London Times Literary Award, and Molvig: The lost Antipodean (1984).
