Vivien Gaston is an art historian, curator, and writer. She has published on subjects ranging from sixteenth-century Italian painting to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century British and Australian portraits. She has curated two major exhibitions The Naked Face: self-portraits (National Gallery of Victoria, 2011) and Controversy: the power of art (Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, 2012). A third exhibition, Sublime Sea: rapture and reality, is forthcoming in 2019. She has been a lecturer in art history at the University of Melbourne and Monash University and is currently a Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.