The Great Women Artists

The Great Women Artists

Created off the back of @thegreatwomenartists Instagram, this podcast is all about celebrating women artists. Presented by art historian and curator, Katy Hessel, this podcast interviews artists on their career, or curators, writers, or general art lovers, on the female artist who means the most to them.

Episodes

November 30, 2025 8 mins
Dear listeners, As we enter a new month of December, I wanted to share a teaser of the audiobook of my new book, How to Live an Artful Life. https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-live-an-artful-life/katy-hessel/9781529155204 Here is an extract from the month of December, featuring its introduction and the first five days. Each month is based around a theme. For example, January is about seeking out ideas, February is about...
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I am so excited to bring you this conversation with the extraordinary Es Devlin, who joined me at Liberty last week to celebrate the release of How to Live an Artful Life. Es Devlin is an artist and stage designer renowned all over the world for her large-scale performative sculptures and environments – from theatre and opera design for the National Gallery and Royal Opera House, to kinetic stage sculptures for musicians like Bey...
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November 11, 2025 40 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed curator, author, and expert in photography, Madga Keany. Currently the Head Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Magda was most recently Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, and before that, Senior Curator, Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery London, where she lead the realisation of a major re-present...
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November 4, 2025 42 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast today is the esteemed curator, Megan Fontanella. A specialist in Modern Art and Provenance at the Guggenheim New York, Fontanella’s research interests focus on late 19th and early 20th European art and the avant-garde in the USA. She has organised a plethora of exhibitions for the Guggenheim across the globe, from Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim (2017); Kandinsky (...
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I'm so excited to say that today’s guest on the Great Women Artist Podcast is the esteemed curator, writer, broadcaster and cultural trailblazer, Ekow Eshun. Born in North-west London in 1968, Eshun has been at the forefront of creative culture for decades. Writing across subjects and presenting documentaries, Eshun has curated groundbreaking exhibitions. From the 2022 In the Black Fantastic, at the Hayward in London – to The Ti...
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October 21, 2025 51 mins
 I'm so excited to say that my guest on the Great Women Artist Podcast is one of the world's most renowned photographers working today, Sally Mann. Hailed for her images of nature in the remote American south –  full of deeply layered memories and rivers that become characters of their own – and intimate portrayals of her children Jesse, Emmett and Virginia, Sally Mann creates photographs full of beauty. Beauty being something th...
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October 14, 2025 44 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most exciting young painters working today, Eva Helene Pade. Born in Denmark in 1997, and based in Paris – where we are recording today – Pade is known for her rich and emotionally-charged, large-scale canvases populated with figures that morph in and out of abstraction. Often set in a dreamworld that can feel akin to being lost in a dance or state of unconscio...
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October 7, 2025 28 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest, returning for his second interview on the GWA Podcast, is the esteemed American writer, critic, and curator, Hilton Als… A staff writer at The New Yorker for over 30 years, and a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, Als is the author of numerous books. He is a teaching professor at Berkeley, Last time Als came on the podcast,...
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It’s officially one month to go until the publication of How to Live an Artful Life, my new book that features a quote by an artist or writer for everyday of the year: https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-live-an-artful-life/katy-hessel/9781529155204 To celebrate, I wanted to share a teaser of the audiobook with an extract from the month of October, featuring its introduction and the first six days, so you can get a feel for th...
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October 1, 2025 36 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA podcast is one of the most influential artists working in the world right now, TANIA BRUGUERA! Hailed for her installation and participatory performance works that blur the boundaries between art and reality, Bruguera has dedicated her life to making work that explores freedom of expression, immigration, totalitarianism, and human rights. She has brought attention to the strict con...
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I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed curator Kelli Cole to discuss the trailblazing Australian artist, Emily Kam Kngwarray! This is a very special BONUS episode and [as a one-off format] an exhibition walkthrough of Kngwarray's show at TATE MODERN. This is the first large-scale presentation of Kngwarray’s work ever held in Europe and a celebration of her extraordinary career as one of Australia’s...
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I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA podcast is the renowned psychologist Lisa Wenger, who is also – very excitingly – the niece of the artist we are going to be discussing today: Meret Oppeheim! Having collected and copied thousands of letters, notes, and documents from acquaintances of the German-Swiss artist – famed for her paintings, sculptures, collages, and more, who was commonly associated with the Surrealists –...
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May 27, 2025 36 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed American painter, Lois Dodd. At 98-years-old, Dodd is famed for her paintings of her immediate surroundings, from landscapes to house roofs, windows and stairs. She paints the Night, day; outside, inside; doors that are painted, chipped; new, worn; and loved. While there is a seemingly absence of people, Dodd’s paintings capture whole worlds and narratives – w...
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May 18, 2025 38 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed American artist, Lorna Simpson. Working across photography to painting, video to collage, Simpson is a multimedia artist who – since the 1980s – has gained widespread acclaim for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Whether it’s fusing text with image, obscuring her subject’s identity, using techniques such as repetition, collage or manipulation...
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May 6, 2025 45 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most exciting painters working in the world today, Michaela Yearwood-Dan. Hailed for her works that bloom, dance, and come alive when you are witness to them, with an abundance of textures, weathers, colours, mark-makings, and more, Yearwood-Dan intertwines the botanical with abstraction, and brings painting back to its natural-like essence. Never restricting he...
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April 29, 2025 34 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most anticipated and exciting painters working today – Danielle McKinney. Born in Alabama, and based in New Jersey, McKinney is hailed for her small, contemplative, introspective and intimate paintings of women. Caught in moments of rest, relaxation and repose, McKinney’s works, to my mind, are a collective portrait of the joys of female solitude. Painted on a ...
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April 22, 2025 43 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the world renowned artist, Bharti Kher. Known for a seemingly limitless practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, found objects, and more; that explores hybrid beings – fusing animals and humans, objects and nature – Kher’s extraordinary art-making looks at and exists both in the real world and imaginary. She is astute at seeing the potential in something, wh...
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April 15, 2025 45 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest, the esteemed art historian, Andrew Hottle, will be discussing SYLVIA SLEIGH! Currently the Professor of Art History at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, Hottle has dedicated his research and writing to focussing on women artists, with specialization in feminist art of the 1970s. He is the author of a definitive monograph on the American realist painter Shirley Gorelick, and his deta...
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April 8, 2025 38 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the brilliant New York based painter, Katherine Bradford. Hailed for her luminous paintings of swimming pools and cosmic skies, ballet dancers and bicycle riders, Bradford takes us to imaginary worlds full of freedom, togetherness and wonder. Not usually specifying the figures in her work, instead she offers us a universal depiction of humanity – that any of us can apply ...
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March 30, 2025 33 mins
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the acclaimed painter, Rose Wylie! Born in 1934, as the youngest of seven children to Victorian parents, Wylie spent her early childhood in India before coming to England aged 5. This was in 1939, in the midst of a bomb-filled Second World War and increasingly fractured world. She went on to study figurative painting, at Folkestone and Dover College of Art in Kent from ...
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