ARCHIVO LAB | Visual Artist 2025

ELLEN NOLAN

United Kingdom

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Ellen Nolan is a lens-based artist, researcher and academic living in London. Nolan’s practice explores hidden feminine histories, experience and representation. Her current work uses innovative archival practice, re-enactment and performance photography and film to consider historical and cultural change, aligning her Great Aunt, Nita Harvey's 1930’s Hollywood archive, its evidence and hidden history, with now. Nolan is a senior lecturer in photography at Ravensbourne University, London, and an AHRC awarded PhD researcher at University of Westminster, and member of the CREAM research group. Nolan has a photography degree and MFA from Goldsmiths College, London. She previously established extensive fashion and commercial experience as a photographer and filmmaker for British Vogue, The Face, and i-D Magazines including shooting campaigns for Dries Van Noten.

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LAB PROJECT

© Ellen Nolan

THE NITA HARVEY ARCHIVE

Hidden History, Experience and Objectification in the 1930s Hollywood Star System

This practice-based PhD draws directly from the heterogeneous archive of my British great-aunt, Nita Harvey, who was selected by Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeMille in a worldwide Paramount beauty contest, and signed to Paramount Studios in 1933, in a three-picture contract. I inherited her archive in 2007, after it had been stored in my aunt’s garage since Harvey’s death in 1987. The archive exists in my sole, private ownership and is housed physically and digitally in my home. Drawing directly from the archive, using feminist film and photography theory together with methodologies of archival studies, radical empathy, oral history, trauma and studies of early Hollywood cinema to underpin my approach, I am exposing Harvey’s hidden history and repurposing archival materials to facilitate new exchanges with the historical past. I will enter Harvey’s archive through the prism of her story, “I didn’t make it in Hollywood; I refused to go on the casting couch,” which was often repeated in our familial conversations. This oral history will be embedded posthumously, as an unpublished narrative positioning Harvey’s voice within the body of her existing archive. This alternate history and version of events, at odds with 1930’s Hollywood mythology, will give voice to Harvey, and the many women marginalised by the ‘star system’.