Catharina Manchanda, Ph.D., has been appointed curator of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
Manchanda succeeds Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., who was named director of the Kemper Art Museum last year.
Manchanda’s appointment comes at a critical time for the museum, which will open a 65,000-square-foot facility, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, this fall.
“Catharina is an innovative and dynamic scholar with a broad range of theoretical interests,” Eckmann said. “She also has a great deal of practical experience developing and implementing exhibitions in a variety of media for some of the nation’s most important institutions.
“I am thrilled that she is joining us.”
A specialist in modern and contemporary art, conceptual art and photography, Manchanda has served in various curatorial capacities at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both in New York, and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, part of the Harvard University Art Museums.
Manchanda said she looks forward to developing a range of challenging exhibits and programs for the Kemper Art Museum.
“Many art museums have a tendency to show contemporary art snapshot-like, with little historical context,” Manchanda said. “I am particularly interested in connecting contemporary developments to a broader cultural and historical context, because the dialogue between old and new — as well as our expanding theoretical vocabulary — offers fascinating insights.”
Manchanda earned bachelor’s degrees in art history, English and German from the University of Stuttgart in Germany (1990); and a master’s in art history from the University of Delaware (1993). In 2005, she earned a doctorate from the City University of New York, writing her dissertation on the crucial role of photography in German art of the 1960s and early 1970s.
As a curatorial assistant at MoMA from 1999-2002, Manchanda worked with Robert Storr on Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, among other projects, and previously conducted research for the Guggenheim’s Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective (1997).
In Philadelphia, where she served as a curatorial fellow from 1993-95, Manchanda organized Between War and Utopia: Prints and Drawings of the German Avant-Garde, 1905-1933. At Harvard, in 1992-93, she co-curated The Sketchbooks of George Grosz With Peter Nisbet. It was the first time Grosz’s sketchbooks were exhibited as a group and the accompanying catalogue fully documented the artist’s prolific drawing activity.