I specialise in modernism with particular emphasis on technology, photography, film, and performance. My research focuses on the intersections of class, race, and labour with artistic modernism in nineteenth and twentieth-century. My PhD, titled A Strange American Funeral: Dance and Technological Reproduction in 1940s USA, was completed in 2022 at University College London. This research reconsiders dance as a medium in art’s history by inverting its conventional location from the dancing body to the materials and media through which dance was documented鈥攆ilm, photographic books, and exhibitions.聽
My current research centres on the film historian, translator, and filmmaker Jay Leyda (1910鈥1988), whose connections to figures such as Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, and to institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Film and Photo League, reveal crucial gaps in our understanding of American modernism’s formation. My article ‘Modernity’s Children: Form as Authority in the Films and Photobooks of Helen Levitt’ won the Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers.聽
I am currently the Rosalind, Lady Carlisle Research Fellow in Art History, Girton College, Cambridge.
Education
PhD in History of Art (2022), University College London. Dissertation: A Strange American Funeral: Dance and Technological Reproduction in 1940s USA, Supervisor: Dr. Stephanie Schwartz.
MA in History of Art (2016), University College London.
BA in History of Art (2013), University College London.
Publications
Field-Donovan, Freya. “Stay the flood: biography as record in the work of Jay Leyda.” JAWS: Journal of Art & Writing (2026).
—– Catalogue contribution for 鈥楬elen Levitt: Retrospective鈥, KBr Fundaci贸n Mapfre Barcelona Art Season. Curated by Joshua Chuang. September 2025 鈥 January 2026. To be published by Thames & Hudson (UK edition).
—– “Nothing in Particular鈥. Review of Andreas Gursky’s exhibition at White Cube Mason鈥檚 Yard in London. Texte Zur Kunst (December 2025).
—–聽Review of Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, by Angela Miller and Nick Mauss, edited by Anthony W. Lee. CAA Reviews (April 2025).
—–聽鈥淢odernity鈥檚 Children: Form as Authority in the Films and Photobooks of Helen Levitt.鈥 Oxford Art Journal, Volume 47, Issue 3 (December 2024): 385-400.
—–聽“Where is the Gaiety?” Camera Forward, vol. 1 (2021).
—–聽鈥淎 Strange American Funeral.鈥 In A Strange American Funeral, edited by Freya Field-Donovan and Emmie McLuskey. Edinburgh: Collective, 2019.
Recent talks
“What Will We Do Without Barbarians?” Panel, CAA 114th Annual Conference, Chicago, Co-organised with Dr. Saul Nelson, Cambridge History of Art
Invited Research Seminar (June 2025) “Stay the flood: biography as record in the work of Jay Leyda”, Cambridge History of Art Department
Research Presentation (November 2024), ‘History as Image’ Series, Institute of the Americas, University College London
Research Presentation “Not Now: Modernism, Nativism, and Fascism in American Art and Culture” (February 2024), Boston/London
Exhibitions and public programming
Weathergirl Film Screening Series (March 2024-present), Curator and Organiser
Participant, 鈥淕roup Show鈥 (January 2023), Halle f眉r Kunst, L眉neburg
Organiser, “If this age fails me…” Film Screening and Panel Discussion (May 2021) Collaborative project with Birkbeck’s Animating Archives Project and MayDay Rooms, London
“Famous Men” Photography Exhibition (January 2020)Gallery 44, Toronto
‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ Reading Group (June 2019) Cabinet Gallery, Berlin
Social Movements’ Screening Series (January – May 2019) UCL, London
Organiser, “24 Lateral Views” (September 2018) Lux Scotland, Glasgow