For more than four decades, Kathryn Bridge has been one of British Columbia’s leading historians, curators, and writers. Best known for her extensive research on Emily Carr, Bridge has made significant contributions to preserving and interpreting the province’s artistic and cultural heritage through her work at the Royal British Columbia Museum and as an independent author and curator.

Her acclaimed publications explore not only Carr’s life and legacy but also the histories of pioneering women, First Nations, western Canadian artists, and childhood in 19th-century British Columbia, making her an influential voice in Canadian history and art.

Dr. Kathryn Bridge is Curator of History and Art (Emerita) at the Royal BC Museum, Victoria. She retired in 2017 after an extensive career in which she variously served as archivist, historian, and curator. Bridge is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Victoria. Her research interests centres on archival sources, with emphasis on Canadian women’s history and art history, and children and childhood in nineteenth-century settler Western Canada.

She co-curated Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing – French Modernism and the West Coast, 2019–20, at the Audain Art Museum, Whistler, which then travelled to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, and to the Royal BC Museum, Victoria; and in 2023 she curated Unexpected: The Life and Art of Sophie Pemberton (1869–1959) at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Bridge has written extensively on the life of Emily Carr, illuminating little explored aspects of the artist’s early years, including within the publication Emily Carr in England 1899–1904 (2014), Emily Carr’s French Journey to Modernism,” in Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing – French Modernism and the West Coast (2019). Recently she produced Unvarnished. Autobiographical Sketches by Emily Carr (2021).

In 2025 her book Unexpected: The Life and Art of Sophie Pemberton accompanied the exhibition of the same name. Emily Carr and Sophie Pemberton — who would go on to become BC’s first professional artist– studied art together as children and were well acquainted throughout their lives. They shared the same childhood art teacher, attended he same church, and were both active exhibiting members of the Island Arts and Crafts Society, now the Victoria Sketch Club.

Chief Curator Stephen McNeill and Kathryn Bridge introducing Unexpected at a presentation on November 15, 2025 at the AGGV.

I was intrigued by the gaps in what was written about Sophie Pemberton, one of Canada’s earliest women artists to exhibit internationally. It seemed she had been given short shrift, and she was most often invoked in comparison to her childhood friend Emily Carr as an example of the dangers of marriage to aspiring women artists. Pemberton lived half her life in England, painted extensively overseas, and had works exhibited internationally before Carr, yet these years have been little researched, understood, or contextualized. Pemberton needed a full life story to bring her out of the shadows. And so, in late 2017, I began. ~ Kathryn Bridge

The Emily Carr Collection described by Kathryn Bridge

Kathryn Bridge presents some of Emily Carr’s archives at BC Archives in this six minute video.