Susan Shifrin is the Project Curator for Picturing Women and the person behind the original conception of the project. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College. She is Curator of Education at the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College and teaches in the College's art history program. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr College. She specializes in the field of early modern portraiture; her work is interdisciplinary, incorporating the history of dress, textual studies, and women's studies.

Shifrin has contributed articles and essays to several collections, including "Transgressing to Transform: The Feminist Engagement With Art History" in Transforming the Disciplines: A Women's Studies Primer (The Haworth Press, 2001), and "Undress, Cross-Dressing, and the Transgression of Gender in Restoration Portraits of Women" in Fantasy and Fashion: Essays On the History of Costume, published by the Bryn Mawr College Libraries in 1996 in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. She is the contributing editor for the volume Women As Sites of Culture: Women's Roles in Cultural Formation From the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, 2002) and is nearing the completion of the manuscript for a book titled "That fair Copy drawn…": Pattern, Parts, and Story in Seventeenth-Century Portraits of Women. She has also lectured and published in the field of nineteenth-century women's studies.

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