PORTLAND, ME.- Thomas Denenberg, Deputy Director, Chief Curator, and William E. and Helen E. Thon Curator of American Art at the Portland Museum of Art, has accepted the position of Director at Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. Shelburne Museum is one of North America’s finest, most diverse, and unconventional museums of art, design, and Americana. Denenberg will start his new job on November 1, 2011.

“From Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography to Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place, Tom has given our community extraordinary art experiences,” said Director Mark H. C. Bessire. “We will miss Tom, but are thrilled for him and his family as he takes on this wonderful position.”

Thomas Denenberg was hired by the Portland Museum of Art in 2006 as Chief Curator and William E. and Helen E. Thon Curator of American Art. He added Deputy Director to his list of duties in 2008. During the last five years at the Museum, Denenberg curated a multitude of exhibitions including the popular and record-breaking Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography, as well as Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place, Moods of Nature: Jay Connaway and the Landscape of New England, and Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England. He also launched Circa, a successful series of exhibitions featuring the work of living artists from Maine and beyond. Denenberg has been organizing the Museum’s much-anticipated exhibition Weatherbeaten: The Late Paintings of Winslow Homer, which will open in September 2012 in conjunction with the opening of the Winslow Homer Studio.

Denenberg holds a Ph.D. in American and New England Studies (2002) from Boston University and earned an undergraduate degree from Bates College (1990). Before working at the Portland Museum of Art, he served as the Richard Koopman Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and as the Betsy Main Babcock Curator at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Among the many exhibitions and books he has organized or contributed to are: Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place (2010), Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England (2009), Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America at the Wadsworth Atheneum (2001), and Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (1999) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.