Julia Voss gained her doctorate with a thesis on visual representations of Darwinian evolution theory. Until 2017, she was head of the art department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and deputy head of the features section. Voss is an honorary professor at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, and her research focusses on the history of abstraction, restitution and provenance, and the connections between evolutionary theory and culture.
