2024 Ursula Hoff Fellowship

We are pleased to announce Dr Jessica Clark as the recipient of the 2024 Ursula Hoff Fellowship, awarded annually to encourage research into the history of prints and print collecting and the role of collections and scholarship within museums and universities.

The Ursula Hoff Fellow is provided access to collections at the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Jessica Clark is a proud palawa/pallawah woman and a curator of contemporary art. She is currently Yalingwa Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and holds a PhD Fine Arts and Music, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne having undertaken curatorial practice-led research investigating how intercultural curatorial models reframe and redefine narratives, understandings, and experiences of Aboriginal art.

We are marking the re-launch of this program with an extended Fellowship of two years, during which Clark will explore our print collections through research seeking to convey printmaking as intercultural fusion: of ideas, cultures, technologies, histories, and stories tied to lived experience.

About Ursula Hoff
Dr Ursula Hoff AO OBE LLD PhD (Hamburg) D Lit (Monash) was born in 1909 in London and died in 2005 in Melbourne. Dr Hoff’s distinguished career encompassed art history, curatorship and museum management at the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Educated in Hamburg, she was among the pivotal first generation of European-trained art historians who introduced the subject to Australian universities. Dr Hoff was a lecturer in the then Department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne and worked at the National Gallery of Victoria, becoming its assistant director from 1968–73. She became the London Adviser to the Felton Bequest from 1975–83. Dr Hoff was a foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1970 and member of the Council of the National Library of Australia. Her numerous scholarly publications include studies of Arthur Boyd, Charles Conder, John Brack and William Blake.

Aims of the Fellowship
Dr Ursula Hoff bequeathed funds to the University of Melbourne to establish a fellowship for the study and promotion of prints held in the print collections of the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria. In recognition of Dr Hoff’s scholarly and professional achievements, the Fellowship is awarded annually to a candidate displaying a commitment to research into prints, the history of print collecting and the scholarly activities of museums and universities.

The Fellowship aims to:

-encourage research into prints held by the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria, and by extension research into the history of prints and print collecting in Australia;

-encourage scholarly activity within the print collections of the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria;

-support the professional and intellectual development of an early career researcher; and

-promote interest in prints and print collecting.