MIAMI, FLA.- Jordana Pomeroy has been named the new director of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU.

Pomeroy, who will officially take the reins in January, comes to FIU from Louisiana State University’s Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, where she has served as executive director since 2012. As executive director, Pomeroy oversaw all operations of the museum, doubled membership, strengthened the exhibition and educational programming, and substantially broadened the museum’s donor base.

“The Frost Art Museum is central to fulfilling our mission as a university that is committed to engaging our community through the arts” said FIU Provost and Executive Vice President Kenneth G. Furton. “Dr. Pomeroy’s expertise and experience will help us take the Frost to the next level as a world-class museum.”

Pomeroy is looking forward to building on the Frost’s successes.

“Miami is a city with great museums,” Pomeroy said. “I am excited about working with South Florida’s art community, as well as FIU faculty and the Frost’s staff to expand the contributions that this young museum already has made to the arts world.”

Pomeroy, who earned her undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University, spent more than 15 years at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, rising from curator of painting and sculpture before 1900 to chief curator, a position she held from 2008 to 2012. She developed expertise in women’s art history and feminist art while at the museum, though her academic background is in 19th century European art.

Pomeroy has written for prestigious journals, including the British Art Journal, and contributed to, edited or co-authored a number of books, including, Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from The Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections; Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque, and most recently, British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections Across the Pond (The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700-1950).

Over the next several months she will serve as incoming director at the Frost Art Museum.

Pomeroy expressed an interest in exploring the intersection of cultures, traditions and mediums.

“I expect you will see exhibitions that reach across cultures and chronology and disciplines to explore rich areas of nexus,” she said. “As a trained art historian, I see art as a continuum from the ancient to the contemporary art world. I want FIU’s students and the museum’s visitors to engage in a dialogue with history as well as individual works of art.”

The museum originally opened in 1977 as a small gallery of less than 3,000 square feet. It has grown to achieve local, national and international recognition as one of South Florida’s key cultural institutions. In 2001, the museum became an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.

Pomeroy succeeds Carol Damian, who has been director and chief curator at the Frost since the 2008 opening of its current 46,0000-square-foot building.