Press Room—Curator Biographies
The Nelson-Atkins employs a curatorial staff with knowledge ranging from ancient to contemporary art. These experts are available as resources to the press for matters related to both the institution and individual areas of expertise. The Museum’s press office is happy to arrange interviews. Please contact us at press@nelson-atkins.org or 816.751.1321.
Robert Cohon
Curator, Ancient Art
Robert Cohon has been Curator of Art of the Ancient World at the Nelson-Atkins and taught at the University of Missouri-Kansas City as a joint-appointment since 1985. With a doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, he has published extensively in international journals on Roman decorative marble sculpture and forgeries of ancient art. His work at the Nelson-Atkins has included the development of the shows Discovery and Deceit: Archaeology and the Forger’s Craft (1996–7); Treasures of Deceit (1998–2000); Spring Fashions, 1 B.C. (1998); and Echoes of Eternity: The Egyptian Mummy and the Afterlife (2000). As part of the Archaeological Institute of America’s lecture program, he has presented his research in the United States and Canada. His current scholarship focuses on the role of measurement in the designing of sculpture.
Margaret C. Conrads
Samuel Sosland Curator of American Art
Margaret Conrads, Samuel Sosland Curator of American Art, received her doctorate in art history from the City University of New York Graduate Center after receiving her master's degree from Washington University, St. Louis and bachelor's degree from Connecticut College. Conrads received international recognition for the 2001 exhibition and scholarly catalogue, Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s (Princeton University Press, 2001). She was also the lead author and co-editor of the two-volume scholarly catalog American Paintings to 1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (2007), a landmark publication that reflects more than 20 years of research on 270 paintings in the Museum’s American painting collection.
Stephanie Fox Knappe
Assistant Curator, American Art
Stephanie Fox Knappe holds a master’s degree in Art History from University of Kansas where she is presently a doctoral candidate. She was the exhibition coordinator for the first traveling retrospective exhibition of the work of Aaron Douglas and served as acting curator, European and American painting and sculpture, at the Spencer Museum of Art at KU before joining the staff at the Nelson-Atkins as curatorial assistant and then assistant curator, American art.
Knappe contributed to the exhibition catalogue Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (Yale, 2007) and to Tales from the Easel: American Narrative Paintings from Southeastern Museums circa 1800-1950 (University of Georgia Press, 2004). She also contributed scholarship to the Nelson-Atkins American Paintings Catalogue for which she was senior project assistant. Knappe has taught various art history courses while an instructor at KU.
Gaylord Torrence
Fred and Virginia Merrill Curator of American Indian Art
Gaylord Torrence is the Fred and Virginia Merrill Senior Curator of American Indian Art at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Professor Emeritus in Fine Arts, Drake University. He is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading authorities on Native American art and is the author of The American Indian Parfleche: A Tradition of Abstract Painting, regarded as a landmark study and publication in the field of Native American art history.
Torrence received an M.F.A. in Painting from Michigan State University. Throughout his tenure at Drake, he headed the Studio Drawing area and, beginning in 1975, developed a program of North American Indian art history, one of the first in the country.
From 1999 to 2003, he served as the principal objects consultant and contributing author for Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis and Clark’s Indian Collection, an exhibition and publication organized by the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
Torrence joined the staff of the Nelson-Atkins in 2002 as founding curator of the Department of American Indian Art, and led the Museum’s major installation of new American Indian galleries which opened in November, 2009.
Ling-en Lu
Assistant Curator, Early Chinese Art
Ling-en Lu, Assistant Curator of Early Chinese Art, joined the Museum in 1999. Born in Taiwan, she holds a doctoral degree in Art History from the University of Kansas as well as a Master’s of Library Science from Indiana University. Ling-en has actively presented papers at Art History conferences and has published several articles on Chinese paintings.
During her tenure at the Museum, she has been a part of coordinating The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology, a special international exhibition organized by the Museum and the National Gallery of Art in 1999, and has contributed to the two-volume book, New Perspectives on China’s Past: Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, which was published by Yale University Press and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2004.
Catherine Futter
Helen Jane and R. Hugh "Pat" Uhlmann Curator of Decorative Arts
Catherine Futter has been the Helen Jane and R. Hugh "Pat" Uhlmann Curator of Decorative Arts at the Nelson-Atkins since 2002. Futter has a bachelor's degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Duke University and a master's degree and doctorate in the history of art from Yale University.
Although at the Nelson-Atkins, Futter focuses on American and European decorative arts from the Middle Ages to the present; her specialization is decorative arts from 1850 to the present. She is currently working in conjunction with the Carnegie Museum of Art on an exhibition of decorative arts made for world’s fairs from 1851 to 1939.
Ian Kennedy
Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Curator of European Painting and Sculpture
Ian Kennedy has been the Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins since 2002. He was educated at Cambridge University and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where he obtained bachelor's and master's degrees in Art History. He then worked for Christie’s in London and New York for 20 years as Senior Vice President in charge of Old Master Paintings. From 1993, he was President of Simon Dickinson, Inc., New York, agents and dealers in fine art.
Simon Kelly
Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture
Simon Kelly has been Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture since 2005. He was previously Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore and Chester Dale Post-Doctoral Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He obtained a bachelor's degree (first-class honors) from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate in art history from the University of Oxford, where he also taught art history. As a specialist in 19th-century French art, and particularly landscape painting, collecting and cultural markets, he has published extensively in various journals including The Burlington Magazine, Apollo and The Journal of the History of Collections as well as several anthologies. He recently curated Manet to Matisse: Impressionist Masters from the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection (2007), one of the inaugural exhibitions in the new Bloch Building.
Kelly is co-author of Untamed: the Art of Antoine-Louis Barye (Prestel, 2006) and has contributed catalogue essays to Renoir Landscapes, 1865-1883 (National Gallery, London, 2007), The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse (Walters Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2007) and In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2008).
Jan Schall
Sanders Sosland Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Jan Schall, Sanders Sosland Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in art history from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2000, Schall organized the National Endowment for the Arts Millennium Projects exhibition Tempus Fugit: Time Flies and produced both its accompanying catalogue and award-winning website. More recently, she curated Kiki Smith: Constellation and co-curated Sparks! The William T. Kemper Collecting Initiative and the five-part New Media Projects exhibition. Schall oversaw the renovation and reinstallation of the Museum’s Kansas City Sculpture Park and developed and implemented both the program and installation of the modern and contemporary collection in the expanded Museum. Schall’s research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Leesa Fanning
Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art
Leesa Fanning is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Fanning holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Kansas. She recently curated Tapping Currents: Contemporary African Art and the Diaspora and Siah Armajani: Dialogue with Democracy. Other exhibitions include the New Media Projects (co-curated) and Realism and Abstraction: Six Degrees of Separation at the Museum. Women in 20th Century Industrial Ceramics took placeat the Jewish Museum of Kansas City and at the same institution, Classic to Cutting Edge: Highlights of the Larry and Cindy Meeker Collection.
Fanning has taught courses at the Museum on ritual and myth in modern and contemporary art, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and Shirin Neshat’s Turbulent. She has taught classes on contemporary art at the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Missouri, and African art at the University of Kansas.
Fanning was a contributor to the exhibition catalogue, Sparks! The William T. Kemper Collecting Initiative. Cambridge University Press has published Fanning’s essay, Willem De Kooning’s Women: The Body of the Grotesque, in an anthology called Modern Art and the Grotesque. She is also published on Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb.
Keith F. Davis
Curator, Photography
Keith F. Davis is Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins and also serves as Fine Art Programs Director for Hallmark Cards Inc., both in Kansas City, Mo. He received a master’s degree in art history from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. After a research internship at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, he became Curator of the Hallmark Fine Art Collections.
Since 1979, he has curated some 70 exhibitions from the Hallmark Photographic Collection that have been presented in leading museums across the United States, and from Sydney, Australia, to Lausanne, Switzerland. In addition to teaching and lecturing widely on the history of photography, he is the author of more than a dozen catalogues and books, including An American Century of Photography, From Dry-Plate to Digital: The Hallmark Photographic Collection, 2nd edition (Abrams, 1999) and The Origins of American Photography, From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1885 (HFF/NAMA, 2007). His various awards include a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986-87) for his work on the Civil-War era photographer George N. Barnard.
April M. Watson
Associate Curator, Photography
April M. Watson holds a master’s degree in Art History from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas. She was awarded an NEA Curatorial Internship at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, where she worked on a retrospective of the artist William Christenberry. Watson has contributed writing and scholarship on photography and its history to numerous exhibitions and catalogues for the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She has also taught courses in the history of photography at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, and in modern and contemporary art at the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Kansas. Recently she contributed to the award-winning monograph The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage (2005).
Jane Aspinwall
Assistant Curator, Photography
Jane Aspinwall has worked with the Hallmark Photographic Collection since 1999. Previous to this appointment, she served as the curatorial assistant of Photography and worked in the American Art department of the Nelson-Atkins. Aspinwall received a master’s degree in 2001 in art history from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She also holds a master’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in arts management received in 1992 from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is a contributor to the book and a co-organizer of the exhibition Developing Greatness: Origins of American Photography, 1839-1885, one of the inaugural exhibitions held in the Museum’s Bloch Building in 2007.
Kimberly Masteller
Jeanne McCray Beals Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art
Kimberly Masteller is the Jeanne McCray Beals Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art. A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright foundation and the Social Science Research Council, Masteller holds a masters degree in art history from Ohio University and is completing her Ph.D in South Asian Art History at The Ohio State University. Before joining the Nelson-Atkins in 2008, Masteller spent seven years as the assistant curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art at the Harvard University Art Museums. While at Harvard, Masteller curated or co-curated nine exhibitions, including the traveling exhibition, From Mind, Heart, and Hand: Persian, Turkish, and Indian Drawings from the Stuart Cary Welch Collection, and served as the co-author of the related catalogue. Masteller served as a Visiting Assistant Professor for two years at Denison University, where she co-curated a student exhibition of their collections of Southeast Asian and Panamanian art. Masteller has also taught courses in Indian, Islamic and Southeast Asian Art for the Art Institute of Boston, Ohio University and The Ohio State University. Recent publications include a chapter “Cultures of Confiscation” in the 2010 anthology A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilisation from the 18th to the 21st Century.
At the Nelson-Atkins, Masteller curated the museum’s presentation of From the Land of the Taj Mahal: Paintings for the Mughal Emperor’s from the Chester Beatty Library in 2009. Masteller is currently working on a collections catalogue and plans for the future reinstallation of the South and Southeast Asia galleries.