Born in Bicester, Oxfordshire in 1959, Joy Gregory studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, London. Since the early 1980s, she has used her talent for making objects of beauty to work through themes of race, gender and identity so that they are both beautiful and about beauty using a variety of photographic media including photograms, gum bichromates, cyanotypes and video stills. Her work has been widely exhibited worldwide, including at the Johannesburg and Havana Bienales, the National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.