Liz Rideal

Marie Elisabeth Chichester Rideal is a British artist, art historian, educator and author. She is a Professor in Fine Art in the Painting Department at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and was a lecturer and educational resource writer at the National [Portrait Gallery, London]. She is known for her early artwork, fine art photography made using a photo-booth. Rideal currently lives and works in London, England.

Early life and education

Born in May 1954 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England. Rideal attended Exeter University and art college and received her B.A. in Fine Arts and English Literature in 1976 and later earned her Post Graduate Certificate in Education in 1978. Since 1992 she has been lecturing at Slade School of Fine Art, which is part of University College London.

In 1985, Rideal started working exclusively with the photo-booth, creating a number of public art projects and investigating ways of using photographic strip digits within photographic collages literally making light drawings using hand gestures in the photo-booth. Many artists have toyed with this low-budget technology, but few have explored its formal possibilities so extensively as this photographer.
Rideal's artwork has been collected by many public institutions, including Tate Modern, British Museum, BBC, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cambridge University Library, the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, New York Public Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Brandts Museum of Photographic Art and more.
Additionally, Rideal's artwork has been collected by private institutions including; The Pfizer, Inc. Collection, the Seagram Collection, the Microsoft Art Collection, and the JP Morgan Chase Collection.

Mirror Mirror: Self-Portraits by Women Artists. by Liz Rideal and contributions by Frances Borzello and Whitney Chadwick, Watson-Guptill, 2002.
Insights: Self-portraits: National Portrait Gallery Insights, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2005;
How to Read Art: A Crash Course in Understanding and Interpreting Paintings, Bloomsbury, London, 2014.
How to Read Art: A Crash Course in Understanding and Interpreting Paintings, Rizzoli, New York, 2015.
Madam & Eve: Women Portraying Women, co-authored with Kathleen Soriano, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2018,

The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles, ed. Millar and Kettle, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, contributions from Rideal are a chapter titled, "Erotic Cloth echoes in film."
500 Self-portraits, published by Phaidon, 2018., contributions from Rideal are a new introduction.