Katie Tomlinson

Lecturer
Fine Art

Katie Tomlinson is a Lecturer in Fine Art and an artist specialising in painting. Her practice explores femme representation, performativity and the queering of Western patriarchal art histories. Drawing on imagery from art history, mythology and archival sources, Tomlinson engages with the codes, conventions and material histories of painting, reworking familiar visual languages through strange and surreal narrative paintings.

Tomlinson has exhibited widely, with exhibitions in London, Seoul, Zurich, Maastricht, Milan and Tokyo, alongside presentations at galleries and institutions across the UK. Her work is held in public and private collections nationally and internationally, including Manchester Art Gallery, which acquired her work in 2026. In 2021, she was awarded the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship to undertake an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London.

Tomlinson’s research examines queer, intersectional and feminist approaches to painting and artistic pedagogy. She is co-founder, with Chester Tenneson, of Queer Painting, a collaborative research project exploring queer, trans+, non-binary and feminist perspectives in contemporary painting. Their research has included exhibitions, publications and conference papers.