BROOKLYN, NY.- The Brooklyn Museum has made three major curatorial appointments. Joan Cummins, a scholar of the art of India, has been named Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art; Patrick Amsellem, a specialist in twentieth-century and contemporary art, will become Associate Curator of Photography; and Ladan Akbarnia, whose field is the art of Iran and Central Asia, has been appointed Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art.

“I am delighted to announce the appointments of these three exceptional scholars and curators, who are each uniquely qualified in their respective fields. Our outstanding collections of Asian and Islamic art and our strong photography holdings will benefit enormously from their expertise, as will all of our public programming, ” states Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman.

From 1998 until 2005, Dr. Cummins was Assistant Curator of the Department of the Arts of Asia, Oceania, and Africa at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and until 2006 served as a consultant to the MFA. Dr. Cummins received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. Her doctoral dissertation was “Dual Darsana: Re-Approaching the Surya Icon.” She also received Master of Philosophy and Master of Art degrees from Columbia University. She is a graduate of Brown University. Early in her career she was a research assistant at the Brooklyn Museum in the Department of Asian Art. She has lectured and published widely and is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. Her book Indian Painting: From Cave Temples to the Colonial Period will be published this year by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Patrick Amsellem was formerly a curator at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden, where he organized the first Swedish exhibition of the work of Andreas Gursky and was part of the curatorial team that produced a major series of exhibitions under the leadership of Lars Nittve. He has written extensively about art for Stockholm’s major newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and was also a critic for the Swedish daily newspaper Kvällposten and for Swedish Public Radio. Mr. Amsellem has taught at New York University and is the author of several exhibition catalogues. He is completing his doctoral studies at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where he received an M. A. in Art History.

Ladan Akbarnia has held teaching positions at Smith and Wheaton Colleges and at Harvard University, where she is a doctoral candidate and received a Master of Arts degree in the History of Art and Architecture. She is also the recipient of a Master of Arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in the History of Islamic Art. Born in Iran and raised in the United States, she is a graduate of Vassar College, where she majored in Art History and French. The co-curator of the exhibition The Tablet and the Pen: Drawings From the Islamic World, presented at the Harvard University Art Museums, she has held research assistantships and internships at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the National Museum of Iran, and the San Diego Museum of Art.

Joan Cummins and Ladan Akbarnia will join the recently reorganized curatorial group comprising the curators of the Brooklyn Museum’s collections of Asian, African, Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art. As Associate Curator of Photography, Patrick Amsellem will be a part of a newly created group of contemporary art curators.

“The Brooklyn Museum’s curatorial reorganization and our commitment to the visitor experience, encouraged scores of highly qualified and distinguished curatorial specialists to apply for positions at the Museum. We are exceedingly pleased to have Joan Cummins, Ladan Akbarnia, and Patrick Amsellem working with us at this exciting moment in the Museum’s long history,” states Director Lehman.