MoMA Taps Makeda Best to Lead Photography Department
The Museum of Modern Art has chosen Makeda Best as its next chief curator for photography, filling a post that has been open since 2022. Best, who will start in September, comes to New York from the Oakland Museum of California, where she has served as deputy director of curatorial affairs since 2023.
At MoMA, Best will oversee acquisitions, installations, exhibitions, publications, and loan programs for one of the museum’s most closely watched departments. The appointment was announced on June 2, and it arrives as the institution continues to shape the role of photography within its broader collection displays.
Best brings an unusual combination of studio training, academic research, and curatorial experience. She studied photography at CalArts before earning a doctorate in history of art and architecture from Harvard. Her dissertation examined Alexander Gardner, the Civil War photographer, and she later worked at the Harvard Art Museums. That background informed exhibitions such as “Devour the Land,” which examined the environmental consequences of U.S. militarism, and “American Job,” a survey of 20th-century photographs documenting labor organizing and strike activity, organized at the International Center of Photography.
Her appointment also marks a notable moment in MoMA’s leadership under director Christophe Cherix, who took over from Glenn Lowry last year and has already named Jodi Hauptman to lead drawings and prints. Best is among the few Black curators hired by the museum during Cherix’s tenure, following the departure of emerging photography curator Oluremi Onabanjo to the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year.
MoMA has collected and exhibited photography since its founding in 1929, and its holdings now include 35,000 prints and objects. Since the museum’s late-2010s renovation, those works have been integrated with painting, sculpture, and drawing rather than presented as a separate department. In a statement, Cherix said Best brings “a fresh vision to the field” and praised her ability to connect photography with storytelling, sociology, environmentalism, performance art, labor, and civic life.
Best, for her part, said MoMA is “one of the only institutions in the world” with the platform and commitment photography requires now. Her arrival suggests the museum intends to keep photography central to its public identity while widening the questions the collection can ask.
