Tamar Garb is the Director of Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL and Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art. She graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town with in 1978. In 1980, she received her master degree in Art Education from the Institute of Education, University of London and in 1982 she graduated master in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art. While working part time in secondary and further education, she completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute in 1991. 

Her research interests have focused on questions of gender and sexuality, the woman artist and the body in nineteenth and early twentieth century French art and she has published extensively in this field. Key publications include Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth Century Paris (Yale University Press, 1994), Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin de Siecle France (Thames & Hudson, 1998) and The Painted Face, Portraits of Women in France 1814 -1914 (Yale University Press, 2007).  Her latest publication in this area is The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth-Century France (University of Washington Press, 2008). Her interests have turned recently to post-apartheid culture and art as well as the history of photographic practices in South Africa.