CalArts Alum Makeda Best Appointed MoMA’s Chief Curator of Photography

Earlier this month, CalArtian and celebrated curator Makeda Best (Art BFA 00, MFA 02) was named the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

“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,” mentioned Christophe Cherix, the David Rockefeller Director of MoMA, within the museum’s announcement.

Best heads to MoMA from the Oakland Museum of California, the place she has served because the Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs since 2023. She had beforehand served because the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography on the Harvard Art Museums, in addition to its interim head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art.

With greater than 25 years of expertise working within the arts, Best has authored and contributed to quite a few books, exhibition catalogues, and scholarly publications. In 2022, {the catalogue} for her Harvard Art Museums present, Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970, earned the Aperture/Paris Photo Photography Catalogue of the Year Award. Last 12 months, she curated the exhibition, American Job: 1940–2011, on the International Center of Photography, to a lot acclaim.

While at CalArts, Best studied studio images with the late photographer Allan Sekula and filmmaker Billy Woodberry. She then went on to obtain a PhD within the historical past of artwork and structure from Harvard University. She has taught at Harvard, Tufts, the University of Vermont, and California College of the Arts.

Best will be part of MoMA in September, the place she is going to oversee the world-renowned Department of Photography, which was based in 1940 and boasts a group of greater than 30,000 works. As Best defined to The New York Times, “This department has influenced, implicitly or explicitly, so much of how we understand the medium.”