SAN MARINO, CA.- Kevin Salatino, 55, director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, has been named the Hannah and Russel Kully Director of Art Collections at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. He joins the Huntington staff in July.

Salatino takes the helm from John Murdoch, who retires in June after 10 years. A New England native, Salatino has extensive museum experience in Los Angeles, having served from 2000 to 2009 as curator and head of the department of prints and drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and before that as curator of graphic arts at the Getty Research Institute. He was named director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2009.

“Kevin comes with extraordinary vision and a very healthy sense of the exciting, multi-faceted museum environment that is Los Angeles,” said Steven Koblik, Huntington president. “We anticipate that he’ll hit the ground running with terrific energy and creativity.”

Under Salatino’s leadership at Bowdoin, a 20-member museum advisory council was created, the permanent collection was reinstalled, and a number of groundbreaking exhibitions organized, including last year’s critically acclaimed, “Edward Hopper’s Maine,” and the upcoming “William Wegman: Hello Nature.”

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is one of the nation’s oldest college art museums, with strengths in the art of the ancient world; Renaissance art; American colonial and 19th-century portraits; 19th- and 20th-century American art, including works by Cassatt, Homer, Sloan, Hartley, and Wyeth; as well as substantial holdings of Old Master, modern, and contemporary works on paper. The museum’s founding collection was bequeathed by Bowdoin benefactor James Bowdoin III in 1811.

Salatino was named director of the museum after it underwent a $21 million expansion that included the construction of a dramatic glass and bronze entry pavilion designed by the architectural firm of Machado and Silvetti.

At The Huntington, Salatino will be responsible for European and American collections in two galleries, the Huntington Art Gallery – once home to Henry and Arabella Huntington, and the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. He will also direct temporary art exhibitions in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, the Huntington Art Gallery, and the Chandler Wing of the American galleries.

He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University in New York and a doctorate in art history from the University of Pennsylvania where he wrote his dissertation on “The Frescoes of Fra Angelico for the Chapel of Nicholas V: Art and Ideology in Renaissance Rome.” An active scholar, he has published on artists ranging from Henry Fuseli to James Ensor to Edward Hopper.