Every now and then, you encounter a woman from history whose story makes you wonder: How has there not been a movie about her?

The art world is full of them. Women who picked up cameras and paintbrushes when the professions belonged largely to men. Women who defied social expectations, forged careers, captured worlds that others overlooked and, in some cases, paid a steep price for doing so.

These five artists, profiled by The Story Exchange for our Women’s History Month coverage, lived centuries apart and worked in very different mediums. But they had something important in common: They refused to stay in the background.

Here are five women artists whose remarkable lives deserve the big-screen treatment.

1. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Painter Who Turned Trauma Into Power

Artemisia Gentileschi’s life reads like the screenplay for a historical epic — and her paintings make the story even more powerful.

Born in Rome around 1593, Gentileschi was the daughter of painter Orazio Gentileschi and became a gifted artist in her own right at a time when women faced enormous barriers to professional artistic careers. As a teenager, she was raped by a family acquaintance. Remarkably for the era, the case went to court, and her attacker was found guilty.

The experience would reverberate through her work.

Her best-known painting, Judith Slaying Holofernes, depicts the Biblical heroine Judith and another woman overpowering and beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. Seen through the lens of Gentileschi’s own experience, the painting takes on an extraordinary emotional force.

But reducing Gentileschi to her trauma would miss the larger story. She was a highly accomplished painter whose depictions of women often gave them something unusual in the art of her time: agency. In her version of Susanna and the Elders, for instance, Susanna actively recoils from the men violating her privacy rather than passively accepting their gaze.

2. Frances B. Johnston: The “New Woman” Behind the Camera

Frances B. Johnston was photographing presidents, celebrities and American life at a time when women in the United States couldn’t even vote.

Born into a wealthy Washington, D.C., family in 1864, she was in her early 20s she was gifted a camera by family friend George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak Co. Immediately she knew she had found her calling. She went on to learn darkroom techniques at the Smithsonian and eventually opened her own photography studio. Her talent and connections helped propel her into an extraordinary role: she became the first official White House photographer, serving across five presidencies.

But Johnston’s career went well beyond photographing the powerful.

She traveled throughout the country, documenting Indigenous and Black communities and bringing people who were often ignored by mainstream photography into view. Her photographs of students at the historically Black Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute — now Hampton University — were exhibited internationally.

And then there was her most famous self-portrait.

In The New Woman, Johnston sits casually by a fireplace, cigarette in hand, beer stein nearby, her petticoats visible. Today, it might look playful. In the 1890s, it was a provocation: Johnston was deliberately adopting the posture and pleasures traditionally associated with men.

She wasn’t just making a photograph. She was making an argument about who women could be.

3. Catharina van Hemessen: The Renaissance Painter Who Put Herself in the Picture

Imagine being a 20-year-old woman in 16th-century Europe and deciding to make a painting that essentially says: I am an artist, and I want you to know it.

That was Catharina van Hemessen.

Born in Antwerp in 1528, van Hemessen became a painter at a time when women had few opportunities to pursue careers, let alone establish themselves in a male-dominated artistic profession. Her father, the Renaissance painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen, likely trained her. Her talent eventually attracted the attention of Maria of Austria, the governor of the Netherlands, who became her patron and later invited her to join the Spanish court.

But van Hemessen’s most audacious statement may have been her self-portrait.

In 1548, at age 20, she painted herself at the easel, creating what is believed to be the first self-portrait of an artist — male or female — actually shown at work. She also signed and dated the painting prominently, putting her name and identity right on the canvas.

It was an extraordinary act of self-promotion centuries before the personal brand was invented.

Only about 10 of van Hemessen’s paintings are known to survive today. But the image of this young woman looking out from behind her easel is unforgettable.

4. Julia Margaret Cameron: The Late Bloomer Who Changed Photography

Julia Margaret Cameron didn’t start her artistic career as a young prodigy. She picked up a camera for the first time at 48.

Born in India in 1815 and raised partly in Calcutta, Cameron spent much of her early life moving around the British Empire, eventually marrying and raising a large family. Then, in 1863, one of her daughters gave her a camera for her 48th birthday.

Cameron immediately threw herself into photography.

Over the next 15 years, she produced hundreds of portraits and developed a distinctive style that was strikingly different from the stiff, formal photography of the day. She moved in close, filling the frame with her subjects’ faces and using soft focus to create haunting, ethereal images. She is recognized as the first photographer to make close-up portraits.

Her work also became part of a remarkable chain of artistic influence. One of her most famous portraits was of her niece Julia Jackson, whose daughter would grow up to become the writer Virginia Woolf. Woolf later drew inspiration from the portrait of her mother when creating Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.

Cameron’s story is a reminder that artistic reinvention doesn’t have an expiration date.

5. Gerda Taro: The Photographer Who Went to War

Gerda Taro’s story has all the ingredients of a gripping historical drama: exile, political upheaval, romance, reinvention, artistic ambition and a life tragically cut short.

Born Gerta Pohorylle in Germany in 1910, Taro fled the country as the Nazis rose to power. In Paris, she became a photographer’s assistant, met fellow émigré Endre Friedmann and the two reinvented themselves professionally. Friedmann became the photographer Robert Capa; Pohorylle became Gerda Taro.

But Taro wasn’t content to remain in anyone’s shadow. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, she went to the front, documenting the conflict with photographs that were intimate, devastating and deeply human. She captured not only soldiers and destruction, but ordinary people caught up in a war that had transformed their lives.

Taro is widely considered the world’s first female war photographer. She was just 26 when she died in 1937 after being injured while escaping a bombardment.