Historic Appointment: Makeda Best, MoMA’s Incoming Chief Curator of Photography, ‘Brings a Fresh Vision to the Field’

THE PHOTOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is welcoming a new leader. MoMA named Makeda Best as the next Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography. A curator and educator, who is also photographer, Best is currently deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Oakland Museum of California. The new appointment announcement said her “scholarship and curatorial practice are distinguished by intellectual rigor and a commitment to situating American photographic history within wider global stories, artistic practices, and social contexts.” The news was first publicized on June 2. Best is joining MoMA in September.

“After an extensive international search, we are thrilled to welcome Makeda as the new Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography,” MoMA Director Christophe Cherix said in a statement. “Makeda’s distinguished career as a curator, scholar, and institutional leader—spanning major collections at Harvard and Oakland—brings a fresh vision to the field. She champions photography’s singular power to connect with audiences through storytelling, seamlessly crossing boundaries into sociology, environmentalism, performance art, labor, and civic life.”

Makeda Best. | Photo by Unique Nicole, Courtesy MoMA

The appointment of Best to head MoMA’s highly regarded photography department is historic. She will be the first Black person to serve as chief curator of the photography department (and first woman in the position on a permanent, rather than acting, basis). Best is also the first Black woman to hold a chief curator role at MoMA since the museum was founded in 1929.

(MoMA does not have an over-arching, museum-wide chief curator. Each curatorial department is led by a chief curator/department head. Kynaston McShine (1935-2018) became the museum’s first Black chief curator when he served as head of the Painting and Sculpture department, from 2001-03, and chief curator at-large, from 2003-09.)

Best will be the first Black person to serve as chief curator of the photography department and the first Black woman to hold a chief curator role at MoMA since the museum was founded in 1929.

BEST HAS SERVED as deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Oakland Museum of California since August 2023. She oversees exhibitions and publications and leads the Curatorial, Design, Production, and Collections Management departments at the Oakland museum, where “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory,” the first museum retrospective of the Bay Area artist, recently opened.

Previously, Best was the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums (2017-2023), where her tenure included a stint as interim head of Modern and Contemporary Art, from February 2022 to July 2023.

Her exhibitions at Harvard Art Museums include “Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970” at Harvard Art Museums (2021-22); “Crossing Lines, Constricting Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art”; “Winslow Homer: Eyewitness”; Harvard’s presentation of “Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America”; and “Please Stay Home: Darrel Ellis in Conversation with Wardell Milan and Leslie Hewitt” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. More recently, Best organized “American Job: 1940–2011” (2025), which was presented at the International Center of Photography in New York.

In addition to teaching at Harvard and Tufts University, Best has been on faculty in tenure-track positions at the University of Vermont and the California College of the Arts (CCA). She earned a Ph.D., in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University and received an MFA in studio photography from the California Institute of the Arts, where she studied with the photographer Allan Sekula (1951-2013) and filmmaker Billy Woodberry, a director who was part of the L.A. Rebellion.

Best is a co-founder of Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a limited-life organization whose stated goal is to “create a more just museum sector by 2030.” She serves on the board of MMF as treasurer. In addition, her fellowship experience includes the Center for Curatorial Leadership and the Center for Curatorial Leadership/Studio Museum in Harlem program.

Best “brings a fresh vision to the field” and “champions photography’s singular power to connect with audiences through storytelling, seamlessly crossing boundaries into sociology, environmentalism, performance art, labor, and civic life.” — MoMA Director Christophe Cherix

MOMA WAS FOUNDED as a bastion of modern and contemporary art intended to showcase the art of the times across a diversity of mediums and topics and, in recent decades, an array of cultures and perspectives. Over the past century, the museum has exhibited and acquired photography and established a dedicated department in 1940. The renowned collection has grown to more than 35,000 items—from daguerreotypes to modern and contemporary works—by artists, as well as journalists, and self-taught photographers.

The chief curator role in the photography department has been vacant for four years since Clément Chéroux departed in 2022. The position has been filled on an acting basis by Roxana Marcoci, MoMA’s David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography. The arrival of Best overlaps with the departure of Peter Schub Curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who is headed to another major museum in New York. Onabanjo starts as curator in the Department of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in August.

When Best joins MoMA in September, she will be responsible for all aspects of the institution’s photography department, including special exhibitions, collection installations, acquisitions, and institutional loans, and publications.

“MoMA is one of the only institutions in the world with the platform and the commitment to photography that these times demand,” Best said in a statement. “I am deeply honored to join the Museum, to work alongside its extraordinary team, and to leverage and grow its collection. Photography is vital to understanding who we are as a society. I look forward to pursuing new research, and to helping audiences develop the visual and critical tools needed to navigate this complex world.” CT

READ MORE about Makeda Best’s new appointment at MoMA in the New York Times

BOOKSHELF
Makeda Best edited “Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970,” which received the 2022 Aperture/Paris Photo Photography Catalogue of the Year Award. She is also the author of “Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Democracy and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America.” The newly published exhibition catalog “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory” documents the first museum retrospective of the Bay Area artist at the Oakland Museum of Art. Best wrote the introduction to the volume. In addition, Best contributed to “Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985,” “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer,” and “Into the Time Horizon,” which was just published to accompany a landmark exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art that brings together about 200 artists around the subject of environmentalism.