Sir Roy Strong (1935-) is an English art historian, museum curator, historian, garden writer, diarist, broadcaster and garden designer. He was raised in Enfield and attended Edmonton County School and then studied at Queen Mary College at the University of London. He completed a PhD in art history at the Warburg Institute under Dame Frances Yates, specialising in Tudor portraiture and particularly in portraits of Elizabeth I and Elizabethan court pageantry, before taking up a research fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research. His first public post was at the National Portrait Gallery in London, starting as an assistant keeper in 1959. He became the youngest director of the gallery in 1967, aged 32, and oversaw popular exhibitions including a pioneering photographic exhibition of Cecil Beaton portraits. In 1971 he married the theatre, television, ballet and opera set designer Julia Trevelyan Oman and in 1973 they moved to The Laskett in Herefordshire. Over the next three decades they developed its four acre field into a notable, autobiographical formal garden, which in 2021 Sir Roy gifted to the horticultural charity, the Perennial Trust.

In 1973 Roy Strong left the National Portrait Gallery and became the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he served until 1987, overseeing a period of funding crises but also successful and influential exhibitions, including 'The Destruction of the English Country House' (1974) 'Change and Decay: the Future of Our Churches (1977)', and 'The Garden: a Celebration of a Thousand Years of British Gardening' (1979) which have been credited as boosting public interest in heritage conservation.

Among his honours, Strong was awarded the FVS Foundation's Shakespeare Prize in 1980, knighted in 1982, made an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society for his services to photography (including his influence on the collecting and curation of photographs in the UK's national collections) and made a Companion of Honour in 2016. He retired from the Victoria and Albert Museum aged 52 and became a garden and landscape consultant (including for Elton John, Prince Charles, and Gianni Versace), a broadcaster, lecturer, columnist for Country Life and The Daily Mail (among others) and author of popular and academic histories, as well as garden-design books. Strong's three volume Diaries published from 1997, are a record of cultural life, art and politics from 1967-2015. As a practicing Anglican, he also served as High Bailiff of Westminster Abbey (2000-2019).