Rebecca Fortnum (b 1963) read English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before gaining a Master of Fine Arts from Newcastle University and taking up a fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, USA. She has been a Visiting Fellow in Painting at Plymouth University and at Winchester School of Art. She has held Senior Lecturer positions at Norwich School of Art and Wimbledon School of Art and been an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University and Central St Martins School of Art. She is currently an Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts, London and Research Fellow in Fine Art at Lancaster University.

She has received several awards including one from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York, a British Council Travel award to Botswana and an Abbey Award at the British School in Rome. She is currently a recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Board grant. She has exhibited widely including solo shows at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Spacex Gallery, Exeter; The Winchester Gallery; Kapil Jariwala Gallery, London and Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham. She has exhibited in group shows in New York, Budapest, Salzburg, Marseilles and Gdansk as well as numerous UK exhibitions. Her most recent group shows include Fluent; painting and words (2002) and Unframed; the politics and practices of women’s contemporary painting (2004). She was instrumental in founding the artist run spaces Cubitt Gallery and Gasworks Gallery and has worked as curator and an art writer, contributing to various magazines and books.