After working in the art history departments at Yale University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (with Rosalind Krauss), and Vassar College, Nochlin took a position at the Institute of Fine Arts, where she taught until retiring in 2013.

[9] Nochlin was the co-curator of a number of landmark exhibitions exploring the history and achievements of female artists.

The exhibit featured art in all forms of media, such as photography, video, performance, painting and sculpture.

[12] In the exhibition catalogue, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin stated "Our intention in assembling these works by European and American women artists active from 1550 to 1950 is to make more widely known the achievements of some fine artists whose neglect can in part be attributed to their sex and to learn more about why and how women artists first emerged as rare exceptions in the sixteenth century and gradually became more numerous until they were a largely accepted part of the cultural scene.

In the conference and in the book, art historians addressed the innovative work of such figures as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Francesca Woodman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Mona Hatoum, in the light of the legacies of thirty years of feminist art history.

[17] She was an advocate for "art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

"[19][20] Her key assertion was that Orientalism must be seen from the point-of-view of 'the particular power structure in which these works came into being,"[21] in this case, 19th century French colonialism.

Nochlin focused primarily on the 19th century French artists Jean-Leon Gérôme and Eugène Delacroix, who both depicted 'orientalist' themes in their work, including, respectively, The Snake Charmer and The Death of Sardanapalus.

[22] As a result, the painting appears to be documentary evidence of life in the Ottoman court while, according to Nochlin, it is in fact a Westerner's vision of a mysterious world.

In Delacroix's "The Death of Sardanapalus" from 1827, Nochlin argued that the artist used Orientalism to explore overt erotic and violent themes that may not necessarily reflect France's cultural hegemony but rather the chauvinism and misogyny of early 19th century French society.

[23] In "Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian," which is the introduction to Nochlin's book of essays Representing Women, Nochlin examines the representation of women in nineteenth-century art and the ways in which the ad hoc methodology is at play, as she writes, "What I am questioning is the possibility of a single methodology—empirical, theoretical, or both, or neither—which is guaranteed to work in every case, a kind of methodological Vaseline which lubricates an entry into the problem and ensures a smooth, perfect outcome every time" and "[Although] the 'methodology' of these pieces might be described as ad hoc in the extreme, the political nature of this project is far from ad hoc because there is a pre-existing ethical issue at stake which lies at the heart of the undertaking: the issue of women and their representation in art".

", by Charlotte Druckman, in which the author analyzes the terms cook and chef, and how each one is attributed to an individual based on his or her gender.