Ellen Nolan is a lens-based artist with a BA (Hons) in Photography from Nottingham Trent University and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is a Senior Photography & Fashion Photography Lecturer at UCA Rochester.

Her doctoral research project draws directly from the physical family archive of her Great-Aunt Nita Harvey, (London) (1928-38). Using feminist film theory to underpin her approach, she aims to re-map the archive creating an innovative counter-hegemonic discourse on femininity and masquerade in 1930s Hollywood. Her practice-based PhD adopts an interdisciplinary approach investigating female identity, experience, and hidden history in relation to Hollywood in the 1930s. By re-mapping the archive trajectory from 1928-1938, she will create a meta-archive and new knowledge on female experience and documentation within a patriarchal system, enabling an examination of the contemporary shifts in representation of women within film and photography, whilst also exploring new strategies and contexts for lens-based performance and imagery that draw directly from the archive. By creating a discourse on Nita’s marginalised history and the conflicting patriarchal Hollywood mythology contained within the archive, she will attempt to reframe then and now.