Suzanne Hudson

Suzanne Hudson received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and is currently Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. She is an art historian and critic who writes on modern and contemporary art. Her research spans the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries with special emphasis on the history, theory, and conventions of painting within art schools and alternative pedagogical institutions, which include spaces of care work and medical and psychological services.

She is co-founder of the Contemporary Art Think Tank and the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, an affiliate society of the College Art Association. She is a recent member of the Editorial Board of CAA.Reviews and the Advisory Board of the Archives of American Art Journal. 

Hudson’s work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Creative Capital | The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Dedalus Foundation, among others. A regular contributor to Artforum since 2004, and an Editor-at-Large for The Brooklyn Rail, she also has written numerous essays for international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs.

She is the author of books including Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT Press, 2009; 2011), Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT Press, 2017), and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson in the World of Art series, 2021), and is the co-editor of Contemporary Art: 1989–Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Modernism, Art, Therapy (Yale University Press, 2024), and Art and Psychotherapy (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).

Supported by the Getty Research Institute (2025-2026), she is writing Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of process within American modernism.

• Ph.D. Princeton University, 2006
• M.A. Princeton University, 2003
• B.A. University of California, Berkeley, 1999