BIOGRAPHY

Maura Reilly is the Director of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. She has held several leadership positions in the arts, including as Executive Director of the National Academy of Design and as Senior Curator at the American Federation of Arts. She is the Founding Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she developed and launched the first exhibition and public programming space in the USA devoted entirely to feminist art. While there, she organized several landmark exhibitions, including the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and the blockbuster Global Feminisms (co-curated with Linda Nochlin), among others. Reilly has curated dozens of exhibitions internationally with a focus on marginalized artists and social justice concerns, including, most recently, transfeminisms, co-curated with Daria Khan, Jennifer McCabe and Christine Eyene, which premiered at Mimosa House in London in 2024, followed by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2025. Reilly has authored several books on global contemporary artists and has also written extensively on curatorial practice, including, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (Thames & Hudson, 2018), which has received many accolades, including a listing as one of the “Top 10 Best Art Books” of 2018 from the New York Times. Her next book, Museums & Social Justice, is forthcoming from Thames & Hudson in 2025. Reilly received her M.A. and PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.