Bee Hughes

Dr Bee Hughes (they/them/theirs) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, and Lecturer in Media, Culture & Communication. Bee’s recent research explores embodied experiences of gender through themes including menstruation, everyday rituals and routines, and the feminist tradition of self-examination. Their recent practice-led works examine repetition, cut-up methods and menstrual normativity encountered through online medical advice, considering how these frequently visited sites of medical authority now form part of the everyday experience of menstruation.

Bee has presented their research and exhibited in the UK and internationally, completing their interdisciplinary practice-led PhD ‘Performing Periods: Challenging Menstrual Normativity through Art Practice’ 2020. Bee has published on a number of topics, including criticality in illustration, the visual culture of Dracula (Stoker, 1897), and most recently menstrual normativity and menstrual art and policy-making. Bee’s curatorial work includes collaborative works with Eva Petersen, such as Comfort Zones (2017), CoLab (2018) at Liverpool School of Art & Design, and Periodical (2018), an exhibition of menstrual art and UK menstrual product advertising as part of Being Human festival of the humanities. In 2020 Bee was Artist in Residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Institute for Gender Studies at the University of St Andrews.