NEW YORK.- The Museum of Modern Art has appointed Leah Dickerman as a Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, announced today. She will begin her new position at MoMA in early 2008, reporting to John Elderfield, Chief Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture. Her responsibilities will include the development of special exhibitions, acquisitions, collection research, and new research programs. Dickerman, who will succeed Joachim Pissarro, is currently Acting Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Lowry said: �The Museum is delighted to welcome Leah Dickerman to its curatorial team. She brings an exceptional depth of knowledge, scholarly expertise and an impressive record of curatorial accomplishments. Leah has worked with The Museum of Modern Art on a number of notable occasions throughout her career, most recently on the highly regarded Dada exhibition, which we were excited to present last summer. We greatly anticipate her contributions as a member of our curatorial staff.�

�Leah Dickerman is a widely respected curator who is known for her scholarly record and for the ambitious nature of the projects she initiates,� said Elderfield. �She is committed to framing important art historical questions with topical relevance, to developing a strong interpretive point of view and for using exhibitions to foster new discoveries. She will be warmly welcomed by the Painting and Sculpture Department and by the Museum at large.�

Dickerman said: �I look forward to joining MoMA�s curatorial staff, to working with its unrivaled collection, and to collaborating with curators who have been both colleagues and mentors over the course of my career. My first experience working in a museum was at MoMA, and it greatly shaped my sense of what it means to be a curator. I am delighted to be returning now, and excited about developing new ideas for historic exhibitions and for the interpretation and display of the collection.�

For the past six years, Dickerman has been Associate Curator in modern and contemporary art at the NGA, where she has built a substantial record of curatorial and scholarly achievement. Dickerman was co-curator (with Laurent LeBon) for the recent exhibition Dada (2005), a major survey of the international Dada movement, which was shown to critical and popular acclaim at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the National Gallery, and at MoMA, where it was coordinated by Curator Anne Umland. Dada was noted as �Best Thematic Exhibition 2006� by the American Association of Art Critics, and its catalogue, edited and with essays by Dickerman, was recognized by the American Association of Museum Curators as �Best Museum Exhibition Catalogue.�

Most recently, Dickerman was the coordinating curator for Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (2006), shown at the NGA and organized by Frances Morris, Tate Modern, and Christopher Green, Courtauld Institute. As curator, Dickerman organized The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera: Memory, Politics, and Place (2004), a survey of Rivera�s Cubist work of 1913 to 1915, which opened at the NGA and toured to the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. For The Museum of Modern Art, Dickerman was a guest co-curator (with Peter Galassi and Magdalena Dabrowski) of Aleksandr Rodchenko (1998), a major retrospective of the artist�s work in all media, which traveled to a number of museum venues in Europe. For the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University (1996) and the Harvard University Art Museums, she organized Building the Collective: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, which examined the use of graphic design in the early Soviet Union.

Previously, Dickerman held teaching positions in the art history departments at Stanford University, California, and at the University of Delaware. An accomplished author, editor, and lecturer, Dickerman has contributed numerous essays to exhibition catalogues, scholarly journals, and magazines, and has lectured widely, organized symposia, and led and participated in panel discussions.

Dickerman holds a doctorate in Art History and Archeology from Columbia University, where her dissertation addressed aesthetics and politics in Aleksandr Rodchenko�s photographic work. She completed her undergraduate work at Harvard-Radcliffe College with a Bachelor of Arts in history and literature.