Susan Best FAHA is an art historian with expertise in critical theory and modern and contemporary art. Best is a professor at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.
Her book, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde[1] focuses on four artists of the 1960s and 70s: Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.[2] It shows how their work transforms the avant-garde protocols of the period by introducing an affective dimension to late modern art.[2] According to Suzannah Biernoff Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde "should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in psychoanalytic approaches to art."[3] The project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant.
In 2017, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography was the joint winner of the best book prize awarded by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, an organisation with over three hundred members.[4]
In 2017, she was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities.[5]
In 2012, her book Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde won the best book prize awarded by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand.[6]