Lynda Nead

Lynda Nead FBA is a British curator and art historian. Her work studies British art, media, culture and often focuses on gender.

She teaches courses on nineteenth and twentieth-century British art and culture, along with lectures on approaches to the History of Art. She has also contributed to a number of arts documentaries on the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky Arts and is a regular contributor to arts programmes on BBC Radio 4, such as Front Row and Free Thinking.

Her latest book, British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Postwar Britain, centres on Ruth Ellis, Diana Dors and Barbara Windsor and includes material delivered as the Paul Mellon Lectures at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Yale University in 2023–2024 – it was published by Yale UP for the Paul Mellon Centre on 9 September 2025. As of 2025 she is working on a book on the 1947 British film It Always Rains on Sunday, for the British Film Institute Film Classics series, published by Bloomsbury Press.