Ana is the Research Associate for the project Feminist Art Making Histories (FAMH), a digital humanities project aims to unearth 'untold' stories of feminist art across both islands from the 1970s to the present day. She combines this research with her Fellowship at the Museo del Prado (funded by Allen & Overy), which explores the museum’s nineteenth-century collections to address the visual representations of feminine childhoods. This project analyses the construction of the “girl”, which became a popular subject in the visual arts and culture at that time, and seeks to intervene in the Prado’s historiographical narratives by bringing novel interpretations of childhood in nineteenth-century art history and visual culture.
In 2023, Ana was selected for the AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers scheme, to build the public impact of arts and humanities by developing programmes with the BBC.
Previously, she has worked as lecturer in the History of Art Department (University of Bristol), where she taught visual arts and cultural heritage studies. As a teacher, she draws on critical pedagogies and radical approaches to teaching. She has also worked in art museums, as Curator at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (Middlesex University) and researcher at the Victoria and Albert Museum (‘Frida Kahlo’). In 2017, she completed her PhD at the University of Leeds, in collaboration with the National Gallery (London).
Ana's research focuses on the politics of public art museums in relation to contested histories of access and participation. She is interested in who museums are for, whom they represent and exclude, and how we might develop emancipatory ways of co-creating museums and archives and their histories.
Alongside her research at FAMH and the Prado, current collaborations include a project with independent scholar Dr Chrys Papaioannou to develop a critical reappraisal of ecofeminism, and an ongoing partnership with Dr Rebecca Bell (University of West of England), around ‘Pedagogies of hope’, addressing pedagogic practice and the role of higher education institutions within a social justice framework.
Recent research includes a critical assessment of contemporary practices of community engagement and pedagogy in museums, drawing on her practice as curator (Museums of Domestic Design and Architecture; Journals of a Pandemic; V&A). In 2020, she co-led Journals of a Pandemic, an independent initiative gathering personal impressions of life in Covid-19 (acquired by Wellcome Trust in 2021). Journals invited contributions from those not well represented in the mainstream media, including sex workers, disability activists from Disabled People against Cuts (DPAC), other activists, students and artists.
Her PhD (2017), in collaboration with the National Gallery (London), explored the curatorial re-organisation of art museum spaces in twentieth-century Britain to understand the formation of new approaches to art, visual education and its publics.
- Baeza Ruiz, Ana. "Towards Sensibilities of Caring with and for Museum Objects in a University Context." Journal of Museum Education 47, no. 4 (2022): 486-500.
- Baeza Ruiz, Ana, and Zoë Hendon. "Displaying Co-Creation: An Enquiry into Participatory Engagement at the University Museum." In Participatory Practices in Art and Cultural Heritage: Learning Through and from Collaboration, edited by Christoph Rausch, Ruth Benschop, Emilie Sitzia, and Vivian v. Saaz, 27-37. Springer International Publishing, 2022. ISBN 978-3-031-05693-2.
- Baeza Ruiz, Ana. "Una’s Becoming Unbecoming, Visuality, and Sexual Trauma." In Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage, edited by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 221-241. Palgrave MacMillan, 2020. ISBN 978-3-030-37997-1.
- Baeza Ruiz, Ana. "Curatorial Experiments at the National Gallery After the Second World War: Reframing History and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Experience." In Making Art History in Europe After 1945, edited by Patricia Mayayo, Noemi de Haro Garcia, and Jesús Carrillo, 67-82. Routledge, 2020. ISBN 9781032400518.
- Baeza Ruiz, Ana. "The rhetoric of looking: a case study about the exhibition of cleaned pictures of 1947." International Journal of Heritage Studies 26, no. 3 (2020): 237-252.
- Baeza Ruiz, Ana. "Museums in the Second World War: curators, culture and change.” Museums History Journal 12, no. 2 (2019): 195-196. Available at DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2019.1644717.
- Baeza Ruiz, Ana. "Museums, archives and gender." Museum History Journal 11, no. 2 (2018): 174-187.
- Stainforth, Elizabeth, and Ana Baeza Ruiz. "Technologies of public culture: Heritage encounters with photography, television and the web." International Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 4 (2019): 595-611.