Philadelphia Museum of Art, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art and Department Head

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is pleased to announce that Eleanor Nairne has been named as the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Department Head, Modern and Contemporary. 

Most recently, Nairne was the Senior Curator at Barbican Art Gallery in London, where she has curated many of the gallery’s best-attended and most critically acclaimed exhibitions, including Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle (2023), Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel Rebel (2022), Lee Krasner: Living Colour (2019), Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017).

Before joining Barbican, Nairne was the curator of the Artangel Collection at Tate, where she organized more than 30 exhibitions and installations across the UK.

Nairne was the guest curator for Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction (2021) at Acquavella Galleries in New York and edited the accompanying publication. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, as well as The New York Times and others.   

Nairne received an MA in History of Art from Courtauld Institute of Art in 2010 and earned a BA in Modern History from Oxford University in 2008. 

Read the full press release here.

Sarah James led this search with Ryan Leichenauer and Siobhan Hanley.