Joanna Gilmour is the Curator, Collection & Research at the National Portrait Gallery. Among her previous exhibitions and publications for the Gallery are Husbands & Wives (2010); Indecent exposure: Annette Kellerman (2011); Elegance in exile: portrait drawings from colonial Australia (2012); and Sideshow alley: Infamy, the macabre & the portrait (2015); and she has been the co-ordinating curator of the National Photographic Portrait Prize (2012, 2013 and 2017). She oversees changeovers to the Gallery’s permanent Collection Displays, and has consequently become a bit of a boffin where Australian history is concerned. Explorers, bushrangers, strumpets, mutineers, and cannibal convicts are among the topics she’s explored in floortalks and in her writing for Portrait magazine; while 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, resulting in the 2011 online exhibition Jo’s Mo Show (with beards).
