Rachel Garfield is an associate professor and head of the School of Art at Reading University. Her areas of interest include: lens-based media, formation of subjectivity in relation to race/class/gender, performativity, narrative, positionality, psychoanalysis, politics, and excess. Her work as an artist is engaged in portraiture in film and video, the role of lived relations in the formation of subjectivity and, at times, Jewish identity.

Garfield’s published writing typically explores the positioning of artists. Topics include: processes of exclusion, hierarchies of victim-hood, documentary practices and the politics of the subject, indeterminacy in the visual field often through the example of diasporic communities, as well as landscape painting and the formation of Englishness in the twentieth century.