A mission to create more joy through art.

A passion to share art with ever wider audiences.

A personal story steeped in the arts and sciences.

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From my earliest memories, I was surrounded by art, and more importantly, artists, as my mother and grandmother were both professional artists. When I was four years old, my mother died of an aneurysm.  I kept her alive with my own creative studies at the Art Students' League of New York City, but decided to reconcile myself to her death by following in my father's footsteps and becoming a medical doctor, believing one day I could help others survive stroke.

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When my grandmother also died of an aneurysm during my sophomore year of college, I was devastated. Suddenly, my pre-med curriculum seemed meaningless. It was in my elective art history courses that I found joy and comfort. That pivot eventually led me to complete a doctorate in Art and Archaeology from Columbia University, where I majored in 19th-century European Painting and Sculpture, with minors in Dutch and Flemish and American Art. 

 

Following a fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I began my professional career as a curator in the Department of Prints and Photographs, Prints and Illustrated Books, and later Drawings and Prints, where I was responsible for American, British, and Contemporary works on paper. I spent my last year as a curator in the Department of American Paintings, completing a tremendously rewarding decade at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

From 2000 to 2018, as John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I was responsible for the curatorial vision, development, and installation of the Foster + Partners Art of the Americas Wing, which opened in November of 2010.

 

While at the MFA, Boston, I was also able to experiment with installations that encourage slow looking, to develop metrics for measuring empathy and well-being among our visitors, and to create pilot programs for collection-sharing partnerships that brought art to underserved communities in the Northeast.

 

After serving as Director and CEO of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, for two seasons, I accepted a fellowship in Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative "ALI" in 2022, where I expanded my portfolio of arts initiatives for greater social impact, including my ongoing work as a Senior Editor for Harvard's Social Impact Review.

 

Art@Heart TM offers access to a range of those initiatives, and I look forward to expanding further with new additions.