Painter, born in Liverpool, who studied at Oxford University, 1982–3, then Royal Academy Schools, 1984–7. Among awards won in 1987 were the Creswick Landscape Prize, David Murray Landscape Award and the Dunoyer de Segonzac Travelling Scholarship. In 1987–8 Heywood won a fellowship in painting at Gloucestershire College of Art, a British Council Scholarship to the German Democratic Republic following in 1990–1, and from 1990 she lived and worked in Berlin. Heywood’s abstract work was gestural with very thick impasto and a rich palette, as seen in a three-artist show at Paton Gallery in 1994. Group exhibitions included Red Herring Art Gallery, Brighton, 1989, other appearances at Paton Gallery and elsewhere on the continent, especially in Germany.