Tori Champion

Tori began her PhD studies in the School of Art History in the autumn of 2021. Her research broadly concerns the art of France and the Low Countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and her primary interests include women as artists and subjects, gendered iconography, the complexities of shared authorship, and the global reach and implications of natural history illustration. Her PhD thesis, currently titled 'Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien and the Emergence of Neoclassicism', will form the first complete study of the life and work of the eighteenth-century French artist-naturalist Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien (1735-1806). Integral to her approach is the investigation of the rich context that surrounded Reboul Vien’s production in eighteenth-century Paris, including the artist’s collaborations with natural scientists and fellow artists, the circle of intellectuals based at the Jardin du roi, the familial creative community of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, France’s colonial presence in West Africa, and period reception of Classical art and architecture. 

Tori will serve as the Drawing Institute Predoctoral Fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York during the 2024-2025 academic year, and will also be a predoctoral fellow-in-residence at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library/Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA in June 2025. She has conducted curatorial work as the Blakemore Intern for Japanese Art at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. She contributed a chapter to the edited volume Women in Arts, Architecture and Literature: Heritage, Legacy and Digital Perspectives (Brepols, 2023). Her article, ‘Catherine Perrot: Color, Gender, and Medium in the Seventeenth-Century Académie’, appeared in Journal18’s Spring 2024 special issue on the subject of Color. A second article, 'Race, Liminality, and the Floral Garland in Eighteenth-Century French Portraiture', will be published in a Summer 2025 special double issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies titled 'Speaking Texts: Interrogating the Norms of Domestic Space, Race, and Gender.'

Tori holds a BS in Public Policy Analysis and International Business from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and an MA in Art History from the University of Washington. In the spring of 2021 Tori completed a master's thesis at the University of Washington titled 'Le pinceau à la main: The Intertwined Lives and Careers of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte and Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien'.