CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The Harvard Art Museums announced today the appointment of Audrey Sands as the Richard L. Menschel Associate Curator of Photography. As a member of the museums’ Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sands will steward a growing collection of photographs and time-based media that includes around 75,000 objects. She will assume her new role at Harvard on February 3, 2025.
Sands currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), Washington, D.C. She is a member of the curatorial team for the multi-venue exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 (2025–26), and she also contributed to the exhibition Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits from the Corcoran Collection (2024–25). From 2019 to 2022, she was the Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a joint appointment with the Phoenix Art Museum, where her exhibitions included Farewell Photography: The Hitachi Collection of Postwar Japanese Photographs, 1961–1989 (2022) and the critically acclaimed Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi’s America, 1940–1978 (2021–22), which surveyed the photographer’s career-long commitment to social justice advocacy.
Sands is author of the forthcoming book Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures (New York: Eakins Press Foundation, 2025), about the suppressed McCarthy-era collaboration between Model and Langston Hughes to depict the American jazz scene, and she recently contributed to the publication Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2023). In 2021, she received a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support her ongoing research and the development of a publication, symposium, and exhibition on the history of flash in photography.
“We are thrilled to welcome Audrey to our curatorial staff,” said Sarah Ganz Blythe, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums. “She brings a deep commitment to scholarship and an expansive approach to interpreting and providing access to historical and contemporary photographic practices.”
An accomplished historian and curator, Sands specializes in 20th-century American photography, with a broader focus on the materials, institutions, and politics of the medium. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in art history from Yale University, an M.St. in history of art and visual culture from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in art history from Barnard College. Sands brings nearly 20 years of experience across academic and museum settings. In addition to her current role at the NGA and her recent role at CCP, she was the Chester Dale Fellow (2018–19) in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. She has also held positions in various curatorial departments at institutions across the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. She has received fellowships and grants from numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship), The Image Centre (Nadir Mohamed Postdoctoral Fellowship), The National Gallery of Canada (Canadian Photography Institute Fellowship), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Tyson Scholarship in American Art), The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Joan and Stanford Alexander Award), American Council of Learned Societies (Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art), Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowship for Historians of American Art), and the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research. While at Yale, she taught courses on 19th- and 20th-century photography, global photography, Korean art, Buddhist art, and the Black Atlantic visual tradition.
“I am honored to be joining the team at the Harvard Art Museums at a pivotal time in the institution’s history, and I look forward to continuing the museums’ commitment to historical interpretation, object-based learning, and championing the work of living artists through renowned collections and programming,” said Sands. “Photography is an inarguably vital mechanism for novel visual experimentation, humanistic critique, and the promotion of justice and understanding. I am excited to play a role in broadening its discourses globally and promoting learning that expands and deepens our relationship to the medium.”
At the Harvard Art Museums, Sands will oversee the museums’ extensive photography collection, including analog and digital photographs and time-based media, which spans from the early 19th century to the present and includes pictures from around the globe. She will develop exhibitions, public lectures, and other programming, and will play an integral role in the planning of installations of photographs and time-based media within the museums’ collections galleries. She will also work with students and faculty to foster curricular use of the collections.
“Audrey’s regard for the material lessons of photographic objects makes her an ideal match for the Harvard Art Museums, where opportunities to study artworks closely in classroom and seminar settings present unique opportunities for rigorous conversations about the ways photography has shaped the modern world. I am delighted to be welcoming her to the museums and to campus,” said Mitra Abbaspour, Head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art.
The Harvard Art Museums are a key repository for the practice, scholarship, and teaching of photographs, with a growing collection of time-based media. The photography holdings have a particular strength in 20th-century American documentary and contemporary photography, with an emphasis on diverse and alternative photographic processes. The holdings include photographs, negatives, and related materials in the collections of the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums and select holdings in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Objects in the collections not currently on display in the galleries may be viewed, by appointment, in the museums’ Art Study Center.
