Dear All,

I am delighted to share the news that Mitra Abbaspour will join the Harvard Art Museums as our new Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. She will also become the new head of the museums’ Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, which oversees the collection of art from 1901 to the present day. A respected veteran in the arts field with over 20 years of experience, Abbaspour brings a dynamic vision and deep commitment to advancing global and inclusive narratives in the scholarship and presentations of art from the 20th and 21st centuries. She begins her new role at Harvard on September 11, 2023.

Abbaspour is currently the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, where since 2016 she has headed the modern and contemporary collections, the most active and interdisciplinary collections area at the museum. In that time, she curated or co-curated 11 exhibitions, including Cycle of Creativity: Alison Saar and the Toni Morrison Papers (2023); Colony / Dor Guez (2022); Helen Frankenthaler Prints: Seven Types of Ambiguity (2019); Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking (2018); and Making History Visible: Of American Myths and National Heroes (2017). She also helped guide important acquisitions and art commissions for the Princeton campus, including installations by R&R Studios (Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt), Jim Campbell, Carlos Cruz-Diez, María Berrío, Maya Lin, and Titus Kaphar.

Abbaspour previously served as associate curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and as assistant curator for the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside, in addition to having served as guest curator for a number of exhibitions at other institutions. She received her M.Phil. at the Graduate Center at City University of New York, and her M.A. and B.A. from the University of California, Riverside, and Scripps College in Claremont, CA, respectively. She has taught courses in her specialization—modern and contemporary art of the Middle East—as well as in Islamic art, modern and contemporary art, and the history of photography at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York, NY; the Cooper Union, NY; Brooklyn College, NY; and at Hunter College, NY. She has authored numerous essays on contemporary artists, contributing to monographs of Reza Aramesh, Lalla Essaydi, Dor Guez, Hassan Hajjaj, Farhad Moshiri, and Shirin Neshat.

We look forward to welcoming Mitra and working with her on amplifying our regional and global impact in the field of modern and contemporary art.

Yours,
Martha Tedeschi
Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director