Alice Butler is an art writer and interdisciplinary scholar who specialises in the intersections of recent and contemporary feminist and queer art, writing, and theoretical practices. Her creative and critical (often cross-genre/cross-historical) work activates reparative forms of correspondence to get closer to embodied states, encounters, and scenes of writing, desire, sickness, and love. She regularly publishes her work across scholarly and creative outputs and contexts, with recent epistolary-themed essays appearing in Bricks from the Kiln (an issue on letters), Correspondences de Appel 1975–2025, and Lifeblood: Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life. Articles on the lives and works of women artists such as Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller, and Kathy Acker have also appeared (or are soon due to appear) in anthologies on women’s fashion photography, art and the critical medical humanities, and the autobiographical impulse in contemporary art, respectively. Alice is co-editor of Gestures: A body of work (Manchester University Press, 2025), which includes her article on Francesca Woodman’s ‘autoerotic attentions’. Her scholarly monograph Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces is forthcoming with Duke University Press in April 2026. She is currently at work on a new book that explores the lives and afterlives of stockings and pantyhose in 1970s–80s feminist art practices.

Alice works at the Royal College of Art in the School of Arts & Humanities, where she is a co-founding member of the Health & Care Research Cluster.  She has previously held fellowships with the AHRC, Paul Mellon Centre, and Terra Foundation for American Art.

IG: @aliceelisabethbutler

Email: alice.e.butler@rca.ac.uk