HOUSTON, TX.- The Board of Trustees of the Menil Collection today confirmed the appointment of one of America’s most distinguished and experienced curators and museum professionals, Rebecca Rabinow, to serve as the institution’s new director. Dr. Rabinow has dedicated her career to date to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which she joined in 1990 and where she is currently the Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art.

A committee appointed by the Menil’s Board of Trustees identified Dr. Rabinow through an extensive international search to succeed the previous director, Josef Helfenstein. Dr. Rabinow will assume her duties at the Menil in July 2016.

Janet Hobby, president of the Board of Trustees, said, “The Board and senior staff of the Menil Collection unanimously join me in welcoming Rebecca Rabinow as our new executive leader, and in offering our profound thanks to Mark Wawro and the search committee for this brilliant appointment. They have selected a director who combines the highest level of curatorial and scholarly achievement with a proven record of museum leadership and lifelong ties to Houston and the Menil Collection. We could not have hoped for more.”

A Houstonian by upbringing, Dr. Rabinow was educated at Smith College (B.A., 1988), the Sorbonne, and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (M.A. 1990, Ph.D. 1995). She is a Fellow (Class of 2013) of the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Rebecca Rabinow said, “I spent the summer of 1988 volunteering in the recently opened Menil Collection, where my job was to preserve Dominique and John de Menil’s correspondence by placing it in Mylar sleeves. However cut-and-dried that might sound, their letters radiated such a sense of history, mission, and creativity that I was hooked on the first day. It is abundantly clear to me that the Menil set me on my career path. I am deeply honored now to return to Houston, an exciting, vibrant, and diverse city that will soon be the third largest in the United States, and to advance the distinctive and immeasurably important artistic and social missions of the Menil Collection.”

Mark Wawro, who chaired the search committee for the Menil, said, “In an extremely strong field of candidates, Rebecca stood out and was the unanimous choice of the search committee. She is a superstar in experience and personality, but more than anything else has a genuine connection to the values the Menil holds dear.”

Among the recent notable exhibitions that Dr. Rabinow has organized at The Metropolitan Museum of Art are Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (2014-15), Matisse, In Search of True Painting (2012-13), and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (2012). These exhibitions traveled to major American and international venues, including the Grand Palais and Centre Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. In addition, she co-organized the 2007 renovation and reinstallation of The Met’s Galleries for Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture. She has edited, co-edited, and written essays for the catalogues for these and other exhibitions as well as publishing numerous articles and lecturing widely.

In her leadership capacity at the Metropolitan, Dr. Rabinow serves on numerous museum-wide committees and boards and was recently the chair of the institution’s Forum of Curators, Conservators, and Scientists. She led this group of 230 diverse colleagues through their deliberations in 2015 and at the conclusion put forward an agenda for action that was accepted with praise.