Barbara Bessac is a French artist, author, researcher and lecturer based in London. She practices painting, drawing and writing alongside her academic duties, researching and teaching art history.

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In her paintings as well as in her research, she explores our relationship to objects and interiors. She paints intimate settings, experienced or dreamed of, deserted but inhabited, where the absence and the traces of bodies are outlined. These portraits of inner worlds are full of references to literature, the history of the arts, and personal stories. Through the repetition of patterns and the accumulation of details, Barbara Bessac's scenes compose an atlas of contemporary domestic decor. She has also developed in her practice the theme of the survival of images, and particularly how her painted work embraces photography. Finally, she dedicates herself to writing the history of Parisian maids' rooms and to projecting these spaces into fiction.

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Since she obtained her doctorate in art history and theater studies in 2022, she has been teaching visual culture and design history in higher education (NYU London, University of the Arts London, Ithaca College London Center, Paris College of Art). She is working on the publication of her first monograph, The Poetics of Props, tracing the history of six objects between stages and domestic interiors. 

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