Rate My Professor Fiona Johnstone

Dr Fiona Johnstone is Assistant Professor in Visual Medical Humanities at the University of Durham, with her role divided between the School of Modern Languages & Cultures, where she teaches on the Visual Arts and Film programme, and the Institute for Medical Humanities, where she leads the Visual and Material Lab within the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities (2023-2030). An art historian by training, she earned her PhD in the History of Art from Birkbeck, University of London. Following her doctorate, Johnstone secured a Wellcome Trust ISSF fellowship, enabling her to pursue two major book projects: her monograph AIDS & Representation: Portraits and Self-Portraits during the AIDS crisis in America (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023) and the co-edited volume Anti-Portraiture: Challenging the Limits of the Portrait (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). During this period, she also curated an exhibition featuring the historic art therapy collection known as The Adamson Collection.

Johnstone joined the Durham Institute for Medical Humanities in 2018 as Associate Editor for The Polyphony, advancing to Acting Editor in Chief from 2019 to 2020. She served as Principal Investigator for the Wellcome-funded project “Thinking Through Things” (2019-2021), which advanced the visual and material turn in medical humanities. From 2021 to 2023, she held the United Kingdom's inaugural postdoctoral research associate position in visual medical humanities. Additionally, she co-directed the interdisciplinary series Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities (2021-2023), culminating in the field-defining edited volume Art and the Critical Medical Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2026). Her recent peer-reviewed articles include “What can art history offer medical humanities?” co-authored with Suzannah Biernoff (Medical Humanities, 2024), “Picture an epidemic: contemporary culture and HIV” (The Lancet, 2024), and “Collaborations in art and medicine: institutional critique, patient participation, and emerging entanglements” (Leonardo, 2023). Currently, Johnstone is developing a new monograph tentatively titled Critical Interlopers: artists as researchers and collaborators in healthcare and medicine. Through her leadership roles, editorial work, and publications, she has made substantial contributions to the integration of art historical methods into medical humanities research.