Dr Alexandra Ault

Dr Alexandra Ault is Lead Curator of manuscripts (1601-1850) at the British Library. In this role she has curated a number of exhibitions in the UK and China and published works including Poems in Progress: Drafts from Master Poets (2022). Prior to this she was a watercolours and drawings specialist at Bonhams Auctioneers before moving to the National Portrait Gallery as an Assistant Curator. She joined the British Library in 2013. Alexandra gained her BA and MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of art. Her PhD, from University College London, considered the Printsellers Association and the trade of fine art prints in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her work is informed by the physical properties of objects as well as their trade, consumption, use and display.

Catharine MacLeod

Catharine MacLeod is Senior Curator of Seventeenth-century Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, and has been a curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, since 1995. She has curated a number of major exhibitions and written on a variety of aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British portraiture and cultural history. These include portraits of women at the court of Charles II, the life and patronage of Henry, Prince of Wales, the painter Anthony van Dyck and the Elizabethan miniaturists Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. She recently curated the new 17th century galleries at the National Portrait Gallery as part of its major refurbishment project, Inspiring People.