Rosalind Polly Blakesley (née Gray) is a prize-winning author,[1] art historian and academic.
[3] She has been selected to take up the office of Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, following the retirement of Lord Chris Smith on 1 October 2025.
A syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Trustee of the Samuel Courtauld Trust, and former Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in London, she has curated exhibitions in Britain, Russia and the US, including Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky at the National Portrait Gallery in 2016.
[1] Other books include Russia and the Arts (2016), The Arts and Crafts Movement (2006) and Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (2000, under her maiden name of Gray), as well as the co-edited volumes From Realism to the Silver Age (2014), Russian Art and the West (2007), and An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (the catalogue of an exhibition Blakesley curated at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, in 2003).
[8] In 2001, Rosalind Gray married Patrick James Blakesley,[3] a barrister and KC.