Gamwell has a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an MFA from Claremont Graduate School, and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and she was director of the art museum at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her curated exhibitions have traveled to the Jewish Museum in New York, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Wien Museum Karlsplatz in Vienna, Austria.
Her books include:
Conjuring the Void: The Art of Black Holes, (MIT Press, 2025)
Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual, revised and expanded edition (Princeton University Press, 2020)
Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press, 2016)
Dreams 1900-2000: Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind (author and editor; Cornell University Press, 2000)
Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914 (with Nancy Tomes; Cornell University Press, 1994).
Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (author and editor; Harry N. Abrams, 1989)
Coco, Janice M. (December 2004), "Book Review: Psychoanalysis and Culture", Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52 (4): 1253–1257, doi:10.1177/00030651040520040301, S2CID145648464
Hahn, Andre Michael (September 2016), The British Journal for the History of Science, 49 (3): 524–525, doi:10.1017/s0007087416001047{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
Dowdall, George W. (July 1996), The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 120 (3): 267–269, JSTOR20093058{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
McGovern, Constance M. (September 1996), The Journal of American History, 83 (2): 617–618, doi:10.2307/2944992, JSTOR2944992{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
Breslin, Ramsay Bell (Spring 1992), "Digging for the truth", The Threepenny Review, 49 (49): 22–23, JSTOR4384083
Scully, Stephen (Fall 1997), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, 5 (2): 222–233, JSTOR20163680{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)