Makeda Best Appointed as MoMA’s Chief Curator of Photography

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has appointed Makeda Best as its new chief curator of pictures, with the educated photographer set to hitch the New York establishment in September.

In an announcement on June 2, MoMA says Best will grow to be the following Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, filling a task that has been vacant since Clément Chéroux’s departure in 2022.

“MoMA is one of the only institutions in the world with the platform and the commitment to photography that these times demand,” Best says in a press release. “Photography is vital to understanding who we are as a society. I look forward to pursuing new research, and to helping audiences develop the visual and critical tools needed to navigate this complex world.”

MoMA has collected and exhibited pictures since its founding in 1929 and formally established a Department of Photography in 1940. When she joins the museum in September 2026, Best will oversee a set of greater than 30,000 works. Her tasks will embrace exhibitions, acquisitions, installations, publications, and mortgage applications throughout the division, which performs a big position in shaping international understanding of pictures’s impression on trendy life.

Best educated as a photographer at California Institute of the Arts earlier than incomes a doctorate within the historical past of artwork and structure from Harvard University. According to a report by Artnet, her dissertation centered on Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner. She later served as a pictures curator on the Harvard Art Museums, the place her analysis knowledgeable exhibitions akin to “Devour the Land,” which examined the environmental impression of U.S. militarism. While working on the Oakland Museum, she additionally curated initiatives together with “American Job” at New York’s International Center of Photography, which surveyed Twentieth-century pictures of labor organizing and strikes.

Best succeeds Chéroux, who served as chief curator from 2020 to 2022 and now directs the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. Roxana Marcoci, MoMA’s David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography, has served because the appearing chief curator within the interim.

“After an extensive international search, we are thrilled to welcome Makeda as the new Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography,” Christophe Cherix, the David Rockefeller Director of MoMA, says. “Makeda’s distinguished career as a curator, scholar, and institutional leader — spanning major collections at Harvard and Oakland—brings a fresh vision to the field. She champions photography’s singular power to connect with audiences through storytelling, seamlessly crossing boundaries into sociology, environmentalism, performance art, labor, and civic life.”