After completing Law and Arts degrees in Australia, Rebecca Hossack (’72) travelled to England in 1981 to study for the Bar but instead launched into a career in Art.

After studying at Christie’s and working at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice, she set up her own gallery, the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, in central London, in March 1988.

She now has two galleries in London and a third in New York, exhibiting work across the broad spectrum of Contemporary Art. She has established a particular reputation for her ground-breaking exhibitions of non-Western Art. The Rebecca Hossack Gallery was the first gallery in Europe to exhibit Australian Aboriginal painting, and continues to promote Aboriginal Art with its annual Songlines exhibitions. Rebecca also campaigns to preserve rock art in Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsular.

Rebecca has curated important collections from Papua New Guinea, tribal India and the Bushmen of the Kalahari, working closely with public galleries and institutions including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery in London, and the De Young Museum in San Francisco. As well as monthly exhibitions in her galleries, she curates the exhibition calendar for Anthropologie UK, The Third Space gyms and has 20 pop-up galleries in London’s Gail’s Bakeries.

Between 1994 and 1998 Rebecca served as the Australian Cultural Attaché to the Australian High Commission in London (her ‘unworthy predecessor’ Sir Les Patterson saluted her as “one beaut Sheila”).

She is on the Board of The Association of Art & Antique Dealers (LAPADA), a Trustee of Resurgence and Ecologist Magazines and writes regularly in the UK press as well as lecturing internationally. She contributed articles on Aboriginal Art to both the Macmillan Dictionary of Art and the Oxford History of Western Art.

In 2006 Rebecca was elected as Councillor for the Bloomsbury Ward in London’s Borough of Camden, the first conservative councillor there for 20 years. She ran in the New York Marathon the following year, raising over £20,000 to ‘green-up’ central London and leads a campaign to turn empty building sites into community allotments.

Rebecca lives in London with her husband, writer Matthew Sturgis, and is passionate about Australia, Art, British Bulldogs, colour, books and embroidery.

Updated January 2016