HANOVER, NH.- Kim Conaty, the Nancy and Steven Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, has been named the Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director of the Hood Museum of Art, beginning October 27, Provost Santiago Schnell announced today.

“Kim Conaty is an exceptional leader and visionary curator who understands that beauty and the arts are central to the life of a university and to our mission of forming whole persons and fostering human connections,” Schnell says. “She brings the knowledge and experience needed to lead the Hood Museum in developing its next strategic plan and continuing to shape its identity as a center for original scholarship and rich student and community engagement.”

Conaty, a specialist in modern and contemporary art with a focus on drawings and prints, succeeds John Stomberg, who retired this month after a 10-year tenure during which he oversaw a $50 million renovation and expansion of the museum and dramatically amplified its impact on campus.

“The Hood Museum stands out as a place where discovery is prioritized and viewers of all backgrounds and levels of experience can find points of entry,” says Conaty, who will be its eighth director. “The museum is at an exciting juncture, with a still-new building, tremendous collections, and a great team at the heart of Dartmouth's Arts District. I am thrilled for the opportunity to lead the museum into its next chapter.”

The Hood Museum, which opened in 1985, contains one of the oldest and largest collections of any college or university museum in the country—more than 74,000 objects representing a broad range of artistic traditions from around the world. The museum is a key part of the Arts District, along with the recently expanded Hopkins Center for the Arts; the Black Family Visual Arts Center; the Literary Arts Bridge, which launched in 2025; and The Warehouse, a laboratory for sonic arts, which opened in 2024.

Conaty's museum 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. While there, she collaborated on exhibitions such as Print/Out, spearheaded contemporary acquisitions, oversaw the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift (which complements the Hood Museum's George Maciunas Memorial Collection), and regularly taught evening courses in MoMA's education department.





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—one of the most influential curatorial jobs in the contemporary art world. 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.

In 2022, Conaty curated the critically acclaimed and hugely popular exhibition Edward Hopper's New York. In 2023, she collaborated with the Menil Collection to co-curate Ruth Asawa Through Line, the first comprehensive presentation of the sculptor's drawing practice.

A self-described “product of a liberal arts education,” she 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.

“I came into college pre-med and stumbled into the field of art history when fulfilling a distribution requirement,” she says. As an undergraduate, writing a paper about one of Claes Oldenburg's proposed civic monuments from a lithograph in Middlebury's art museum “opened a whole world” to her.

“It was the sense of wonder, the challenge of taking in visual information that didn't quite square. I recognized that art could be materially and compositionally thrilling but also that it could serve as a portal to another moment in time—the politics, social context, personal histories, the very conditions of a work's making and how we experience that today,” she says.

Throughout her career, Conaty has embraced her role as an educator and has helped develop and support the next generation of curators and art historians through mentorship. “I am a firm believer that academic museums have the power to create transformative experiences, whether a student is going on to study art history, or simply to have art and culture as part of their lives.”

Colleen Boggs, associate dean for the arts and humanities, who chaired the search committee, assisted by the search firm Isaacson, Miller, says she is “thrilled” that Conaty will be the next Hood Museum director.

“In a very competitive search, she stood out as the highly credentialed and forward-thinking leader we were hoping to find. She brings extensive experience to this leadership role and will provide expert stewardship and forward-thinking vision to a valued campus resource,” Boggs says. “She will be a thought-partner for students, alumni, staff, faculty, and senior leadership, and an incredible advocate for advancing the arts writ large at Dartmouth.”

In addition to Boggs, members of the search committee included:

• Mary Lou Aleskie, Howard Gilman '44 Executive Director, Hopkins Center for the Arts

• Paul Christesen, William R. Kenan Professor of Ancient Greek History and chair, Department of Classics

• Mary K. Coffey, professor of art history and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean studies

• Nathaniel Dominy, Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology and chair, Department of Anthropology

• Amelia Kahl '01, Barbara C. and Harvey P. Hood 1918 Senior Curator of Academic Programming, Hood Museum of Art

• Brooke Minto '01, Hood Museum Board of Advisors

• Kate Norton '01, assistant vice president for advancement for centers, institutes, and special projects

• Jane Novak '92, member, Dartmouth Board of Trustees

• Ramie Speicher, associate director for finance, Hood Museum of Art

• Tricia Treacy, professor and chair, Department of Studio Art

• Steven Tseng '95, Tuck '01, chair, Hood Museum Board of Advisors

Barbara Will, vice provost for academic and international affairs, is serving as interim director of the museum until Conaty's term begins.

Conaty says she and her family—including her husband and their two sons, ages 10 and 13—look forward to exploring their new environment and discovering outdoor opportunities in the Upper Valley.

“We're a city family that has always loved every minute we have outside of it—mountains, lakes, you name it. This will be a great fit for us,” she says.