Dr Penelope Jackson MNZM is a New Zealand based art historian and curator. Over the past decade she has published three books with the common theme of art crime. They are Art Thieves, Fakers and Fraudsters: The New Zealand Story (2016), Females in the Frame: Women, Art, and Crime (2019), and The Art of Copying Art (2022). Penelope has also curated exhibitions including the award-winning Corrugations: The Art of Jeff Thomson (2013-5), three exhibitions about the life and work of children’s book writer and illustrator, Dame Lynley Dodd (which toured to 23 venues across Australia and New Zealand), as well as An Empty Frame: Crimes of Art in New Zealand (2016-17). A former curator and director of Tauranga Art Gallery, Penelope was a founding member of the New Zealand Art Crime Research Trust of which she is now Chair. In 2020 she was a recipient of the University of Auckland Michael King Writers Centre residency (could not complete due to Covid lockdown). In 2023, Penelope became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to art crime research and visual arts. She was awarded an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship to complete her PhD, Writing and Righting: Crime and Copying in Art History, at Charles Sturt University. Several of Penelope’s short stories have been published and her anthology of 25 short stories titled One Degree Off: Stories of Singapore was recently published by Marshall Cavendish International. She is currently writing a book for Monash University Press about the untold back stories of Australia’s art history which have been excluded from the mainstream art historical narratives. Her book, The Art of Copying Art, won Best Book in the 2023 Art Writing and Publishing Awards. Jackson is an Adjunct Research Associate of Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW.

 

---