Ana Baeza Ruiz

Ana Baeza Ruiz is a Lecturer in Museology at the University of Manchester, with a background in museum studies, art history and cultural studies. Her collaborative PhD at the University of Leeds and the National Gallery (London) focused on debates about cultural democratisation in mid-twentieth-century public art museums in Britain. Subsequently, her research has expanded to consider more recent iterations of participation, including contemporary practices of co-creation in museums.

Since 2022, Ana has been involved in Feminist Art Making Histories, an oral history project that aims to bring to light untold stories of feminist art across the UK and Ireland from the 1970s to the present day, to offer a rich account of the creative experiment, cultural intervention and collaboration that constituted feminist practice in the later twentieth century. In 2023, Ana joined BBC New Generation Thinkers Scheme, developing radio programmes about this research: Portraits (June 2023); Women, art and activism (November 2023); What does feminist art mean? (March 2024).

Between 2022-2024, Ana was a post-doctoral fellow at the Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid), for a project exploring the visual construction of the ‘girl’ in the museum’s late-nineteenth century collections, and developed new public engagement activities with the museum's learning team. She has also held research and curatorial roles at the V&A (Frida Kahlo exhibition, 2017-2018); the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (Curator of Engagement, Middlesex University, 2018-2021), and as co-founder of Journals of a Pandemic (acquired by Wellcome Collection in 2021), a collaborative online project recording the experiences of people, including sex workers, disability activists, students, and artists during Covid-19.

Previously, she has taught visual arts, architectural history and cultural heritage studies at University of Bristol, University College London and Middlesex University.  

Ana’s research is situated at the intersection of feminism, visual culture and museums, with an emphasis on contemporary participation and activisms in public arts organisations, the role of social justice pedagogies, and histories of feminist art practices in the UK 1970s-1990s. Her research considers the politics of public art museums in relation to contested histories of access, community engagement and pedagogy in museums, and the co-production of histories, heritage and archival practices. Her forthcoming monograph Modernisation and Democracy in the Twentieth-Century Art Museum in Britain: A Museum for Everyone? (Routledge) will be published in 2025/2026.