WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Gallery of Art announced today that Virginia Anderson will join the museum as the Christiane Ellis Valone Senior Curator of American Art and head of the art of the Americas. She will assume the role in November.

Anderson will lead the art of the Americas department, which stewards the National Gallery’s collection of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from the Americas. In this role, she will advance the museum’s continued development of a collection of art of the Americas that is reflective of the broad scope of artistic innovation across various media and time periods. Anderson will oversee a permanent collection of paintings, sculptures, and works of decorative art from the 18th century to present day, including the Kaufman Collection, one of the most significant collections of early American furniture and decorative arts ever assembled.

Anderson joins the National Gallery from the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), where she is the senior curator of American art and department head of American painting and sculpture and decorative arts. She brings decades of experience and deep expertise in the field as a scholar of American painting, having organized major exhibitions and installations spanning the colonial era to the present.

“We are thrilled to welcome Virginia Anderson to the National Gallery. Her wealth of experience in the field of American art will provide strong leadership in the ongoing growth of our collection of art of the Americas while enriching the presentation of historic American art at the museum. Anderson’s deep scholarly knowledge and expansive thinking will be a great asset as we work to make our galleries more engaging and relevant to museum audiences today,” said E. Carmen Ramos, the National Gallery’s chief curatorial and conservation officer.

“I am honored to join the distinguished staff of the National Gallery, whose collection of American art is one of the finest in the country. This particular moment offers great opportunities to share the depth, richness, and cultural relevance of this renowned collection with today’s audiences,” said Anderson. “I look forward to working with the outstanding curatorial team to consider the stories these works can tell about the breadth of the American experience, and to celebrate the ways in which American creativity connects to materials and movements from across the globe.”

Anderson’s curatorial practice is centered on expanding the narratives American art can tell through social histories and innovative frameworks, which will further the National Gallery’s ambitions to present a richer and more interconnected history of art in the Americas to its audiences.

While at the BMA, Anderson led the reinstallation of several galleries of the museum’s historic American collection, including two period rooms and galleries that unite paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts to consider themes including land and labor in 19th- and 20th-century American art. She curated and co-curated significant exhibitions including Seeing the Essential: The Sigmund M. and Mary B. Hyman Collection of American Art (2026), Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again (2026), Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA (2024), and By Their Creative Force: American Women Modernists (2019–2020), among others. Her next exhibition, Tempting to Touch: Surface and Substance in 20th-Century American Art, will open at the BMA in May 2027.

Prior to her time at the BMA, Anderson was the Diane and Michael Maher Assistant Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. There she coedited a major collection catalog, American Paintings at Harvard, Volume Two: Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels, and Stained Glass by Artists Born 1826–1856, and co-organized an exhibition of American pre-Raphaelite art, The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle (2007). Anderson has also served as an appointed adjunct professor in the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University, and as an adjunct professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Anderson holds an AB in government from Harvard University and an MA and PhD in art history from Boston University. She is also a member of the American Art Curatorial Committee at the Harvard Art Museums.