Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director

We are pleased to announce that the Hood Museum of Art has selected Kim Conaty to serve as the next Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director, effective October 27, 2026.

Conaty’s career began at the Whitney Museum, where she first served as a curatorial intern and later as the coordinator of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In 2008, she joined New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she worked in the Department of Drawings and Prints as curatorial assistant, then as Sue and Eugene Mercy Jr. Assistant Curator. In 2015, she became a curator at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, where she organized solo exhibitions on Fred Eversley, Tony Lewis, and Sharon Lockhart, among others, as well as Collection at Work, which revealed the museum’s behind-the-scenes conservation and cataloguing efforts to public view. 

In 2017, she returned to the Whitney Museum as the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, and in 2024 was named chief curator. In that role, she has overseen the Whitney’s collection, acquisitions, exhibitions, publications, and conservation efforts; co-directed the museum’s first collection strategic plan, which established a new framework for its collecting priorities; and collaborated with the senior leadership team on the Whitney’s 2026 institution-wide strategic plan. She was a Class of 2025 Fellow at the prestigious Center for Curatorial Leadership. 

Her curatorial practice is distinguished by rigorous scholarly research and a talent for building popular exhibitions around underrecognized artists and bodies of work and for championing artists’ first major museum surveys, including Mary Corse: A Survey in Light (2018), the celebrated artist’s first solo museum exhibition. 

Conaty graduated from Middlebury College and went on to earn a master’s degree in art history from Williams College and a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She studied in Hamburg, Germany, on a Fulbright Fellowship and completed a summer fellowship at the Clark Art Institute.

You can read the full press release here.

Ben Tobin led this search with Ryan Leichenauer and Alaine Small.