Heather L. McCarthy is an Egyptologist who received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she studied with David O'Connor. She is the deputy director of the New York University Expedition to the Ramesses II Temple at Abydos, where, as an epigrapher, she worked to document the temple’s decorative program for its recent re-publication.

She has also worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and for the Getty Conservation Institute’s Valley of the Queens Field Project.

She has written about Ramesside queens, the female pharaoh Tawosret, sex and gender in ancient Egypt, the Valley of the Kings, Deir el-Medina, funerary literature, ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs, monumental battle scenes, and Egyptian temple cosmology.

Her dissertation, “Queenship, Cosmography, and Regeneration: The Decorative Programs and Architecture of Ramesside Royal Women’s Tombs,” is an analysis of fifteen royal women’s tombs in the Valley of the Queens.

Among her awards, she has received the American Research Center in Egypt Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Samuel Kress Fellowship in Egyptian Art and Architecture.

Her current research project elucidates the impact of early 19th Dynasty queens’ tomb programs upon the iconographic tradition and tombs of the contemporary, neighboring Deir el-Medina villagers, who were responsible for cutting and decorating the royal women’s tombs.